The stars had long flung themselves around you,
knucklebones forecasting the rest of the world, or perhaps just this night.
Wood creaks as the wind tears the words formless from your lips, sending them
tumbling down into the gorge below. The grass surrounding you is a rich verdant
green, shadowed by the towering trees and the vast expanse of the dark. Every
time you open your mouth you taste the wet earth, every breath inhales the
frosted air, every sound that reaches your ears is met with confusion.
His lips move, as do yours,
but if either of you are speaking words, you don’t understand them. The spray
from the waterfall flecks your face with tears; the waterfall of your tears
flecks the stream with salt. A heron cries out, perhaps answering you. Your knuckles
are white and numb, clenching at vestiges of hope, his hands between yours.
Droplets sit still on his eyelashes, like dew upon morning grass, wavering
above dry eyes. A jaw chiselled from stone threatens to crush you beneath its
weight. He says two words, and though
you can’t hear them you know what they must be, just as you know how hollow
they are. Your hand stings almost as much as your eyes, red like blush swelling
from under his stubble.
He does not move. Nor do you.
You each stand, perfect in your isolation, fractured by your proximity, two
halves of different wholes. The wood around you sways imperceptibly. An
eternity passes, too quickly, and then you have moved, or perhaps everything
else moved around you, hurled you toward the stream.
His hands reach for you, but
your white knuckles have gripped their last. The river swallows you greedily,
silver beneath the waxing moon, as it urges you to follow your wind-swept
words. His granite face, breaking at last, splitting across the middle. Your
throat hurts, torn from the screaming. You are weightless, unchained for the
first time. You close your eyes, your mouth, your heart.
Overlooking the gorge there
stands a perfect paradox, one fractured half of a whole that never was.
