It hasn't escaped his attention that most days it feels like she is all he has. Like the darkness could swallow him whole were it not for her and those eyes. Those hands. That presence. Everything that swirls around him, threatening to consume him completely, seems to pose less threat, when she is near or at least in his thoughts.

It scares him to think that he places his hope in such apparitions, as though just a glimpse of her could make his world right itself on its axis. Make the pain and the memories melt away.

He played with a knife once, he thinks to himself, not wanting to explore too deeply the recesses of his own mind. But this is one memory that he cannot, for the moment, push back down. He remembers slicing a tomato or something equally ordinary and marvelling at the clean way the blade cut through everything. Right to the heart. He watched the light glint off of the cool metal for a little while and imagined how it would feel to break flesh. To draw blood. There wasn't much to live for in those times and the darkness seemed to bear down on him like a person kneeling on his chest or sand pouring itself into his lungs and destroying him from the inside out. He thought of her face in those moments, and the fact that he might never see it again or find out how their story would end. He thought of her and aspired for more. For life. It was such a viscous hope to hold on to, not rooted in reality. He knew it then, as he knows it now. But at least it was something. Something, where there was otherwise nothing.

He knows better than anyone that he could well find himself in that place again, some time in the future, not too far from today. For now, this seems like the only certainty in his sorry existence. But still, she propels him forward. She is reason enough to keep breathing. And he takes that little pinprick of light, as insignificant as it might seem, and uses it to restart his heart for another hour. Another day. Another week, if he is lucky.

04/18/2009

Posted on 04/18/2009
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