> cigarettes after sex - apocalypse
"WHAT A STRANGE place to be," I commented, after having found them in the dusty third aisle of a forgotten closed bookstore. "-in the middle of the night."
The air smelt like dust and cardboard, and with the towering shelves illuminated by the moonlight, the old bookstore looked too ethereal a place to belong on earth.
"She loved being here," They murmured, their eyes glazing over the ratty books, a longing to their features.
"Who are you talking about?" I questioned, looking away from the rows and rows of worn-out books to their glassy eyes.
"Well I... can't remember," They breathed as they gently slid their finger over the spine of a book.
"All I know is that she had the loveliest brown eyes, and she had freckles all over her ankles, and she loved the books from this store." They pulled out the book from the shelf, dust glittering in the flooding moonlight all around her. "I remember everything but her name."
They pressed the book to the left of their ribs, their smile full of sweet sorrow pulling their lips, as their lost eyes met mine.
"This space inside—" They held the book so tight to their chest, as if they wished for it to be melded into them.
"—Maybe I shouldn't have remembered anything at all."
The mournful sorrow etched in their eyes drowned me in ways I'd never drowned; in ways that made my lungs clench into nothing, in ways that made my ribs curl until they interlocked.
"That's the curse isn't it?" Their glassy eyes dragged mine, like an arrow to a target, the depths of them grappling for the surface.
"To love someone so beautifully and deeply, but to forget them faster than the seasons." They smiled softly to me as they spoke, as the shine of the moon bathed their back.
"If a tree falls in a forest with no one around, did it still fall?" Pained words fell from their lips like butterflies, fluttering, into the cold. "If my ribs echo empty; are these feelings still real?"
I could only pry the book from their hold and wrap my cold arms around them.
"Even if a tree fell without any witnesses, their cold husk would have birthed new flowers and even if you've forgotten their mortal names, your ribs still ache at the thought of them." I spoke as knowingly as I could about something I knew nothing about. "It's the graves that people are remembered after—it's the aftermath that counts."
"It's the aftermath that counts," They repeated in mellowed softness, like cumulus clouds in purple.
