In Every Waking Moment

Prologue

Final manuscript: Ready to be published world wide.

Serafine

To end the sonnet that ends all sonnets...

To kill a love that kills all love...

To dream a dream that awakens all dreams...

First, there was, Serafine.

The hands of Ava shook as he wrote his last piece, it was entitled after her name, as always. She was the before and Ava was the aftermath and in the matters that made a foolery out of this nineteen year old boy, it was , were and is, forever will be, Serafine.

What makes a fool? What makes a writer? What makes both in the matters of which the heart was touched?

Ava wrote about her. Ava wrote about her a lot. Ava must have written letters, poetries and imprinted wisps of her on paper twice or maybe five times a day in the next three-hundred sixty-five days. She had let him taste the kind of love that was maddening, the kind of love that runs in your system, the kind of love one would die for.

"Stop..." A voice whispered in Ava's ears that sent spiders crawling down his spine. His hands stopped writing momentarily- it was about the voice, soft, familiar, commanding. He shook it off and swig down a bottle of wine, then continued writing, hunched-back in the darkness of his room.

"Ava.." The voice drifted, the table trembled. Ava stared at the bottle, watching as the voice called out again drifting in the waves of the wine. He must have imagined it, he thought. Running his hands through the mess of his tangled hair, he emptied the bottle in his mouth. A cold wind passed through him and he closed his eyes, he could smell her. It smells of the ocean and wood smoke, the smell he used to complain because she smelled musky and unlady-like, but it was the smell of home. "Serafine..."

"Love..." The voice answered and when Ava opened his eyes, he was met by two pairs of onyx. His heart almost burst from his chest- the happiness, the longing, his hands lifted up, disbelieving, caressing her face as if she was a china doll.

"You need to let me go love..." There was something wrong with her, as her ruby red lips moved, she drifted from being solid to translucent and Ava couldn't... "How come I couldn't touch you love?" He whispered, thinking that if this moment was a dream, he needed not to wake up. If this moment was a dream, it was a cruel one.

"I have read your letters in my grave..." She said, her voice sad like a melody sung on funerals.

"Come back to me Serafine..." Ava touched a strand of her hair, solid and then gone. He felt his heart slowly disintegrating. Serafine, my love. He thought as he stared at her face. He remembered the first time he saw her, she called him pretty boy, he countered by calling her features contradicting. Her eyes were the darkest like a void that evidently swallowed Ava whole and slanted, her nose small like a button, her lips puckery and inviting, her hair red like wildfire and her skin caramel and as sweet. He memorized every part of her, studied it even but for Ava, Serafine was the book he couldn't finish.

"I can't. Please, let me go. I cannot go through the light with your silhouette blocking me..." Forehead to forehead, solid then gone and back there again, cold to touch.

"Then take me with you. A thousand words cannot bring you back. A thousand worlds cannot take you away from me. I am dead without you anyways...just please"

Serafines cold fingers lifted up Ava's face. Underneath the dark circles, pain streak eyes and the pale complexion that tells he has not been kissed by the sun in a long time was the pretty boy she met at the beach. His eyes were brown like firewood and it flickers every time he confessed his love for her but now they were dark and empty like her ashes and Serafine felt her cold dead heart doubled in weight.

"My love if you love me then let me be at peace..." She trailed kisses down his neck. "I will always be here, in your heart, in your words and I love you, in this world till the next one..." Kisses up to his face then down the side of his lips. Then she looked in his eyes, her dark coils igniting, pleading, commanding it made Ava's chest heave. "If you love me, then live. Live for me, my love."

Ava closed his eyes, felt the ghost of a kiss on his lips as his tears falls down- it tasted of memories, of summertime and Serafine. When he opened his eyes again, she was gone. All that's left was silence. The kind of silence that was consuming, that comes to and end, a period at the end of a story and the finality of it rang into Ava's ears and it hits him like a bullet wound. He lets himself cry, he lets himself feel. He has been dead after a year of the death of Serafine and now he felt that he was very much alive and in pain, so much, too much- he wanted it gone, the longing, the memories, even Serafine. He wanted her out of his system, out of his chest. He broke the bottle of wine and grabbed a shard. He gripped it hard till blood came out, why must pain come with existing? He wanted to not exist anymore. He was tired, and heartbroken and nothing without Serafine.

"If you love me, live..." He gripped it harder till his hands grew numb.

"I cant. I can't. I Can't..." He said it again and again like a prayer and right before the collision of glass upon skin, solid upon flesh, a butterfly with the color of death flew in and landed on Ava's nose. It was the darkest butterfly Ava's ever seen and it smells of woodsmoke. Summer air entered Ava's lungs and he could breathe again. He laughed, chest aching and he let himself crash on his bed. He glanced at the window and upon the horizon, a shooting star.

By dawn Ava continued writing, the last sonnet, the very last one for his lovely Serafine. The sonnet that ends all sonnet, the love that kills all love, an end, a start, Serafine.....

Aiden looked at the final manuscript and thought of her.

Her Serafine. "In every waking moment..." He whispered and as he closed it and walked through the isle towards the airplane going nowhere, finally leaving her behind, he could hear her reply.

"In every passing hour, I love you Aiden."