Between Loss and Nothingness

They’ll ask me how I am, and I’ll assure them I’m doing well. I’ll deliver an implausible performance, and they’ll pretend not to notice.

Silently we’ll all share my absence. Without allusion to this or any other inconvenient disturbance, we’ll somehow all feast in this smouldering farrago of unanswered questions and unquestioned answers.

Somehow. What remains clear to the mind is lost to the heart. Why not then remain truly silent? What compels this insufferable murmur?

We will feast on these burnt offerings, but my hunger for her touch will remain. Entirely illicit, its every cut bleeds across me and into the ravenous torment of memory.

Memories of us. Of a singular hope. Now fading into sense. Into char, scorch. Into this, that. Into what, and who, and, of course, how.

But never, anymore, now. Just now. I would give the nothing I have left to know that adoration. A childlike prayer for innocent perfection. The gift of skin and breath, beyond the assurance of time’s defilements, or at least together in the warmth of unspoiled ignorance.

But the coals have gone out. The reborn eyes of the known see more than the tortured lens of my mortal desires, and their every cut bleeds across me and into the rapacious void of what is unavoidable truth.

No solace will be found here. I know that much. I’ll sit, desolate, aimless, alone amongst friends. And she will sit similar, dreaming of that corner of the universe which only arises between us. And we’ll believe time to be our only balm. And starved we will remain. Adrift. Beyond the reach of hand, but not of hope.