When eventually the sun stopped showering my apartment with radiant golden daylight, I would have guessed for the end of the world. The white roses on my kitchen table began to shred their petals, these petals formed an uneven, yet readable circle around the vase, expanding and thickening after each time I saw to the petals and wiped them away. In its own, dark way, I responded to Jamie in a similar manner. Every time that I pushed her further away, she would reappear closer than before, my memory of her clearer than a vision, and more of as an intense hallucination.
I disliked winter not for the cold or the snow, but for how I lost my sense of time in the midst of darkness. I found myself running aimlessly on the fields, searching desperately for a single source of light. But at the final break of dawn I came to realize, that light I had been seeking, was Jamie. With that light I could thrive, I could even tame the night.
The darkest of my thoughts were quite vile and lowly. I solely wanted her to disappear from the face of the Earth, although not yet sure why. My fantasies of this were colorful, bright and eerily realistic. But even then, I could not escape her, every day her smile and white teeth dug deeper into my consciousness. I could not tell between day and night, not between reality and Jamie.
There was a particularly detailed scent that I associated with her. It was the smell of the dusty city streets moments after dawn had broken. Unsure why I had this memory so deeply engraved in my mind, I recalled seeing her smoking a cigarette outside the 7/11 before hopping on a bus. That was the last time I saw her in three months, our next reunion would not be until late winter, when the snow had begun to melt and flood the streets in ice cold water and filth.
While she was gone, I fell deep into my demise, I fell lower than I had ever been. I felt my humanity slowly crumble into nothingness, an empty void and unsatisfying dreams. The darkness of the night sky was all that kept me afloat. I watched the sky and I knew that somewhere on a quiet dirt road, she was looking up at the same sky.
And the same unsatisfying dreams.
And somehow, through that faint connection, I could sense her entire being, her cold breath on my neck, and her dead eyes eating mine.
I could chase the wind through the dying cornfields, mistaking it for her. I began to drift into who she wanted me to become, a slave, a worshiper, so that in the end all I meant for her was unquestionable devotion. But I would never become a part of that flowing filth, I would never bow down to a saint.
Yet, I could never have guessed that saints carried such brute beauty, or her melancholy.
I could have sworn she was more of a supernatural entity than a harmless college student. I believed she was there to bring me to ruins - and people thought I was crazy, I was crazy for going against her, for questioning her sincerity.
But she was a vulgar creature, I knew it for sure. Deep within this was what she lived on; addiction, divine obsession. After being touched my her gaze, I knew heaven was not for me, and that was simply because she would be my nemesis. I didn't want to see hear her voice perpetrate from empty hallways, yet she haunted me, her face imprinted within me. I couldn't run, I could only fall on my knees and surrender to what was right in from of me.
My cries did not echo like hers did, my voice was sucked dry by her overpowering being. Every day I looked for a switch to turn out the light, I looked for a door that would lead me to the backyard. But she knew that I was tied to a cycle of pleasure and more pleasure, and I would not leave even if I could.
It drove me to an agonizing point of anger, how terribly angry must have I been to cry for her. I screamed her name to the skies, not even expecting a response. It was a secret between me and the wind, I vowed to protect the remnants of my pride, for hers were already shattered. I mustn't give in to my despair, I had to fight my destiny. But even then - even then I couldn't resist the call of life.
Soon enough, I forgot what life had been like before I met her, and during those disconnected months that that I spent staring at her from the shadows. I got back on my feet, sighing from relief, if not crying from it. I was whole once again. Freeing myself from her grasp was the first step towards regaining my sanity, and, my dignity.
I could not afford to fall on my knees as I had, I couldn't stare even if she suddenly were to pop out of nowhere and rush towards me. I couldn't give in to the void, the void had to stay.
My mother was a charming person, she had always had her way with people. However, I do not blame her, nor look down on her, as her fate could be no different from Jamie's. I was not a part of their world, a world so presentable and proper, I would have been a threat to that perfection. They were saints, not favored by gods but the people.
I presumed that the reason why I despised Jamie so was because she had those particular qualities that I did not, ones I had grown to hate long before. She must have known right from the start that I had been cast out, fed to the wolves, and maybe she even pitied me. I wished to tell her that being devoured alive was worth not bowing before her, or the people that considered themselves one with her. Their smiles were like an itch, they made me sick to the stomach, and what was most unnerving was that I could never overpower them.
When my countless realities finally began to collude into one, I studied my life and found it rather amusing to say the least. I remembered my countless affairs, the lives I'd ruined and the people I had ripped apart. One particularly cold winter I worked shifts at the coastal bar, but that was before I started picking up fights with anyone I bumped into. I often worked the nights along with a man who was struggling to finance his university studies. If I'm not mistaken, his name was Alistair and he aspired to become a wartime journalist - only issue was that there was no war. "I find it controversial, how we need war, regardless of its expenses", was what he said.
Alistair disappeared into the raging of the waves. But I never learned to grieve, I had not been taught how to yet. I had not been shown the kind of pain that turns one into a madman, making them seek for safety in the night.
If I ever were to meet Jamie again, not as a reunion but as a new chapter in another life, I would follow her when she left again. I would follow her to an old building abandoned by the side of the road, covered in moss and wild vines. The sun would bleed in and disperse, leaving no light behind.
But if there was another chance to trace back my steps and run the other way, I would be too ashamed to catch up to her, to call out to her, and to break my lifelong solitude.
The water turned green before her, bubbling, poisonous. But I would still drink it off the ground.
