BEFORE THE STORM

LOVERS IN RUINS

| two souls, one cataclysmic unity. | "your body, this empty canvas, is your to paint, yours to taint, yours to explore." | he gazed over at me; outlining a map with his eyes, coloring it with his lips and memorizing it with his fingertips. | the moon was our altar; the stars watched on as our hearts bloomed into the sun. | that was the night we became gods. | (darling, i really thought i'd found my heart in you.) |

| we became passion; a beautifully shrouded inferno. | it was old leaves in the autumn breeze, it was the two of us buried under silk sheets, it was in the way he fell asleep. | we kissed and kissed and kissed until space collapsed and time ran dry. | this contrived flame of ours—we needed it to remain timeless; to sustain those empty voids we refined deep inside. | (but neither one of us minded the silent corruption.) |

| i was hoping, praying that we'd become exquisitely transcendent in our unison, him and i. | (oh, to become one with ruination itself!) | but alas, this was only the beginning of our end. | this capricious universe we so carelessly cursed served us our own rotting intestines on a wounded tray—an organic platter in the color of ash—constructed from fragmented bones, soundless cries and shattered dreams of our future. | i smiled as i emptied my plate. |

| there was a deafening silence in our dying immortality. | we were stuck in our own sardonic reverie of apocalyptical hope and melancholic truths. | delusions were seeping through his paper-thin skin like potent ink; tattooing and tainting his decaying insides—just as it did mine. | (our minds manufactured toxins that reached beyond the realms of mortal sanity.) |

| history lies forever buried deep beneath our hollow hearts; soaked with corrosive blood and dried up tears. | we carved out the best, most intricate pieces of ourselves that never shaped us into the otherworldly seraphim we could've been. | the sky screamed for us to see, to feel, to hear—to listen; to inhale the chaos we'd created together. | (but we held our breaths until its light moved away; until darkness claimed us and built us synthetic shelters instead.) |

| museums aged into mausoleums as winds grew into hurricanes. | ecstasy mourned itself into bitter heartache and dreams collapsed into nightmares. | (i even memorized the letters he never wrote me.) | we fabricated olympian empires from the embers of the brittle bones we so blissfully scorched with our hellfire hearts. | "now i'm all out of gasoline, darling." |

| our hearts were once pure, but our romance birthed ruination. | "whether it's this life or an impending afterlife, even hell would feel like heaven if it's with you!" | but life as we knew it had fallen prey to something even more grim than the reaper and his soulless scythe of death. | (and there was no escaping this vexing singularity.) | bitter certainty struck us both through a bolt of glacial black lightning that brought us down to our knees. |

| the bitter realization made us crash into each other like two frozen rainclouds; trying so desperately to set each other ablaze using our asphyxiating misery as tools. | the collision ripped our flesh apart and ignited our necrotizing lungs; boiling our scarlet insides and chilling our bones down to their very cores. | together, yet apart, we crumbled back down to solid ground. | (all our broken pieces left abandoned and scattered for no one and everyone to find.) |

| we were sizzling and crying and freezing and dying in scornful unison; like an explosive sandstorm trying to find its way back home through the loneliest winter skies. | we locked eyes one last time before our last remaining shards finally broke through our inner walls; completely tearing our souls apart. | as broken and isolated as we now are, together we cried the world to sleep before ultimately becoming nothing at all. | (the stars will decide our fates from now on.) | "oh, how i wonder... does he still recall the night we masqueraded as gods?" |