Emptiness

It's her! Hymn for the Shameless.

Turning his head to the mirror in front of him to his right, behind the bar, he saw her.  The first time he had seen her since she had died.  He whipped around to where he had seen her in the mirror. Nothing.  But he knew what he had seen.  Turning back to his now empty glass, he felt an odd calmness seep through him.  He stopped fidgeting and sat still, staring and staring, waiting for her to show again.  He thought about her in the mirror, she was taunting him, he knew.  He couldn't hear her anymore, not since she had screamed, but he thought he could see her shadow out of the corners of his eyes, like in that dead end.  Without realising it, he had gotten up from the bar and walked into the still frigid and dark outside, Annabel on his heels.  He looked up to count the stars that had disappeared since he was in the bar and found all of them had gone their own way once clouds had covered the sky.  Walking down the block mindlessly, he turned left and turned right, and went to an abandoned park with a small cliff surrounded by a fence, to the left of him.  Sitting on a dark bench he had stumbled onto, he stared up as snow started to fall from the starless sky.  Thinking of his previous actions at the bar, he now wondered why he wasn't there.  When did I walk outside? He didn't realize he had moved at all.  Reflecting on his actions, he remembered he was incredibly aware as he killed those men.  He thought now that what he did was incredibly sick, disgusting, horrid.  But he couldn't get the pleasure out of his head.  It was choking him, killing his self that knew what was right and wrong.  He thoroughly enjoyed killing those people and what's to stop him from doing it again?  He could feel himself standing and slipping off the edge of a cliff who's fall leads to insanity.  Thinking of this fall, he remembered the actual cliff near the park.  "How ironic." He stood up from the bench and stepped into the newly fallen snow, dizzolving under his feet, and turned left to walk to the cliff. Jumping the fence, he walked to the edge of it.  Too small to really be a cliff, but big enough to seriously hurt or kill a person if they fell off of it.  Staring down, his hair at the top of his sight and the snow falling down to the ground past the lip of the cliff he was standing on, here.  Here, he decided he would lose his sanity.  He let it slip through his fingers and fall to the bottom.  He imagined it making a sound at the bottom, "kaplew!" And he began laughing at the silence the snow had surrounded him with.  "The snow has taken my Annabel away!"  It was true that he hadn't heard her since before the bar.  And he wasn't seeing her shadow.  It abandoned him.  He stood in that same place, and even watched part of the sun rise.  He went back to the bar.  He walked in, avoiding the dead's stares.  Leaning over the bar's counter, he grabbed a bottle and poured himself another drink.  He downed it and walked out, people already starting their days.  Unlocking stores, taking walks.  He smiled at a man across the street and waved at a mother and her daughter apparantly waiting for someone in the bar.  He was in a good mood.  "Where should I go and what should I do today?" He asked himself.  Following the street the way he came to get to the bar in the first place, he felt the still falling snow start to melt on his hands and face.  Yet, his hands and his face did not feel cold in the slightest, and rhe smile he had used on that old man had not faded.  Looking in a still black window he saw his reflection.  He saw her reflection.  Whipping around as he had done in the bar to see if her reflecting was true he saw nothing.  "Again, nothing!!" He almost shouted it, but after he said it he realized it might be a good thing he saw her in those windows.  He really couldn't live without his Annabel.  The smile now replaced the frown as he continued down the street, seeing his Annabel in every reflection he passed.  Still smiling, he walked all day.  To where he was walking, he forgot each time he focused on it.  But was that important? He was happy, calm, when he walked.  At a point in the afternoon, he looked up and saw his destination.