After I met Jamie, I stopped looking for salvation at every turn. Though I didn't come to this realization until much later, or too late, if it even mattered. Time did not matter anymore. I'd lived my whole life like an animal without a home, not looking for safety but taking it from everyone else. But I was a dying breed.
"You think you're lost at sea, but there is no sea", She smiled, the scenery behind her stretching for miles of nothing. Radiant, so radiant that I could feel it like a knife in my heart. She was right, we were the only thing in this world that was real. The flashing white, pain that didn't feel like pain after all.
She stood up and walked away, into the white noise. I reached out a hand after her but pulled it back instinctively. The water still wavered, and we flowed through time, intertwined. She walked past me but didn't look at me, neither did I. I always felt the stares of others when they bared their teeth, flesh burning and eyes full of quivering rage. They were always glaring at me from the dark.
While the rest of the world was a rotten green, green until it finally died and turned black, she was untouchable light. Just like the horizon and the sky, which could never be reached because they didn't exist. The more she told me to accept, the less I did. She told me to burn and I showed her hell instead. But every time that she sat down next to the pieces of broken marble, white paint on her fingertips, everything turned quiet. As though the world became deaf at that moment, to not hear the things it didn't want to hear. But she whispered them to me.
I wandered deeper onto the forest in search of her, I scorned through all the dirt roads and looked in all of the wrong places, just to kill time. I knew where she was because she never really moved from that one spot, she didn't know how to, she was a statue for people to admire. But I wasn't as bitter as I used to be, the more time I spent with her, the more human I became. I separated myself from the illusion of what I believed myself to be, so that maybe, maybe one day she wouldn't recognize me anymore and would walk past me for the last time. I imagined her digging through the mud, mixing with her tears. Tears that became the soft spring rain. But I also knew that would never happen, that rain would only wash me away and she wouldn't look for me in the mud or the spring. She would be gone as well.
Where we stood, we stood at the edge of the world where empty cities tore into the ground and everything was an earthly brown. Life like no else had ever known it. It was our secret from the world, to keep for ourselves. She knew how to savor things, I didn't, all I was good at was throwing them away. Crushing them under my feet, like bugs and human pride, I watched them take their last breath and whisper words of comfort to themselves. I was not cruel, not like her, the word lost its meaning when put next to something that could not be explained. The light was always colder than the dark. The dark swallowed you whole but the light would force you blind.
"I'm here, I'm here", She spoke softly. I gripped her arms tightly, then her shoulders and lastly her face. For the first time I looked into her eyes and in them saw a wasteland, a place for all the things people weren't supposed to say. All of my forgotten dreams. I belonged in her nightmares and she belonged in my dreams, she was always there, though I would never tell her that, but she must have already known. I knew people would never get bored of her, they would never abandon her, they could take one look at her and cast away their whole humanity. She knew their deepest voids were just helpless cries for someone to save them from despair.
