Pale Fragments

floating

"He floated there with her for an entire year, connected to the tubes which gave him necessity for life; all except that drug, immortally seducing sedation for eternity. Every day he floated he considered going back to sleep," the Goddess said to me.

-

She didn't know he watched her, analyzed her as she might've watched a model as she painted; she was somewhere else entirely. All he did was look and weep, calling her name, caressing her limp arm, asking her why she wouldn't wake and be there with him. He was alone among 99 bodies.

What else could he do but remember? Type on his notebook (yes, everything is waterproof in the future, Ida), play Mario Kart. And all the time sitting next to his wife still fast asleep on the path to Heaven. He never considered himself a writer or a poet; that was always Xadrin's thing. But he wrote a lot. What else was there to do?

It was only when, at the end of that year floating in the dark, he allowed himself to see the ease in her sleeping smile, the beauty in the thin lips curving gracefully, that he left, swam out of the temple. And that is when I came back to him.

*

From Anders' notebook:

This once upon a time is over, and the worst thing about it is the knowledge it was a fairytale.

Is that the worst thing?

Eve, did you ever love me? If love from one to one is gifted by a fundamental God, an everlasting love, that love that spurred you forward on your nineteenth birthday to say to me you wanted to be with me forever as a God and Goddess of the Kingdom, then it must be unavoidably true that Gods can die, for if you loved me and there's divine connection there allowing us sensitivity to the plights and needs of one another, if God was there guiding our souls together as it's evident He was, then why won't you wake?

Or have I been taken away in temptation? Is this why I woke? Then why would I wish it on you?

But this is not...is it..? Is this what the Prophet meant?

-

Time has passed...

I'm as the impatient ghost of an old phoenix,

and she was the fire gently set

that consumed my forest home.

-

I know I loved her, for self-deception can't exist in dreams...

All I do is dream, in here, it seems.

I feel driven to abandon all rationality and find an exorcist!!.

Beware the unavoidable haunting of the Past!..

Though real it may seem, it cannot touch you unless you fall to its piercing urgings.

Never let that ghost convince you it's the bridge which must be crossed across a chasm to the Future.

But—

Yes, I loved her. Yes, she loved me.

Yes, she hurt me. Yes, I hurt her.

Yes, it is unfixable. It is done.

And in these simple facts there is a gravity that pulls my skin away from bone.