Amour plastique

TW: death

Static sings a hollow tune that expands through the empty night, filling every crevice with with a wave of white noise. The ringing manifest itself into sparks suspended mid-air, shining light upon the dirty pavement of a desolated street that goes on for three dim-lit lamps, and gets lost in the mist. In a whiff, the thick brume forcefully infiltrates through my nostrils and permeates to my lungs with an intoxicating taste of wine. My senses overwhelm me, and I have to blink to clear away the building headache. Eyes closed, I trip over a dent in the ground, and only then do I notice my feet moving on their own, taking me places only they know. I stop myself short to look upwards, away from this distorted reality, in which noise shines and the fog is drunk. Beyond the sky’s abyss, the full moon in its splendor pales against the swarm of stars scattered in randomize patterns, shaping themselves into constellations that don’t really exist outside the human capacity for finding trails of things familiar to them in the vastness of the unknown. The world seems at peace, but in my mind everything divagates. Vertigo tightens my stomach at the thought of plummeting into the void, with not a single cloud to catch me if i do. I’m about to loose it, but when i turn, I find you next to me, and your presence manages to ground me to this earth.  

I lock stares with you, and instantly I loose myself in your eyes; two soft gray moons eclipsed by your dilated pupils. I hesitate—unsure if you’re really here, with me, or whether I merely concocted you in my dreams—and quietly I stammer, “I don’t know where we are, or where we’re going.” I don’t know who I am, but I feel like I know you, is the question without a question I long to make you.

You turn to me, leaning into my ear to whisper with a hoarse voice, “Do we need to have a destination? Isn’t this enough, this feeling that everything’s right for now?”

“How long will it last?”

You sigh in a dramatic fashion. “Only till death do us apart.”

“Is that happening soon?”

Your eyes reflect the melancholic yellow of the streetlight, and you stare at me for a heart beat or a lifetime, your semblance gentle and resigned. “I don’t want to die, but when I drown in the wave of your loving gaze,  I find death to be a comfort.”  

Even when the meaning of your words eludes me, they sit right in me. 

“Aren’t you scared?” I feel like I’m starting to sound like a broken, questioning record, and I should be beginning to annoy you, but you only smile vaguely, the cut on your cheek turning into a half-moon, bemused. You press those blood-tinted lips to my neck and whisper, “An ending with you is but a reassurance of things to come.” You trace a finger in circles through my cheek. “We don’t know what things are coming, but I know I only want your soul wandering through my skin.” I can feel your smug smile growing against me, satisfied at your tongue in cheek even now, in the most unfortunate of situations. “Come.” You take my hand and start pulling me forwards. 

Up ahead, the fog dissipates, and more lamps appear as we approach. When I look back, however, the ones we passed close up behind us in a curtain of fog, and the world looks almost as it was before we set out, but not quite. The suspended lights stay, and the only thing that’s changed are new blinding flashes of red and blue coming from a fixed point. My body tenses, filled with a dreadful feeling that I know what lays up there. 

You notice the shift in my stance, and I notice that you quicken your pace, place yourself in front of me, and then turn and start walking backwards, all in an attempt to shield me from the metal carcass and the police patrols. 

“This was one of the better lives. We spend a few good years together.” Your cheerful tone gives you a youthful air that can’t help but to be contagious. I nod, agreeing with you even when I’m not able to remember what, exactly, we did all these years. 

As I struggle on recounting the past, an image comes to mind; a daydream so recurrent it must actually be a memory—it’s the feeling of a pulse so slow that a season used to feel like a lifetime. “Do you remember when I used to be a flower living in your garden?” 

Your gaze turns unfocused, seemingly concentrated on remembering. “And I was a woman that tended to you every dawn with water and a garden knife.”

I feel silly and high in the exchange of tales that are both meaningless nonsense and our most treasured secrets. “And when you picked me up, I bowed to live inside of your heart forever, my Romeo.” 

You chuckle. “Yes, thats me. Right now I am who you want me to; my own forgotten, I am but your name.”

Only then do I realize I don’t remember my own name as well, but I don’t need to. Names no longer have meaning past you and me. I get it now; we’ve been through this before countless times, starting since the earliest beginnings of our world. We’ve always come back to this twilight that holds our in-between; the one place where we free our ties from earthly confines, where the fractures of ourselves mend, and we join to the slow march of our shadows through a window in time. 

Without realizing, we’ve walked past the wreaked vehicle without batting an eye, and you take your place besides me once again. 

Beyond the chaos, two figures lay in wheeled beds, back robes hiding the better part of the mess of limbs. The faces of our husks are uncovered; your hair sticks out in all directions, the gash across your face that even your shadow carries is still bleeding hard. If your body looks ragged, mine looks mangled. Both beings emanate a rancid energy. I wonder if you can feel it too, the wrongness we left behind to rot. “Can you hear the sorrowful sighs of our dying bodies?” I whisper, frightful that they could hear us and get offended. 

You wrinkle your nose in disgust. “What a shameful sight we make; we’ve become two sacks of chemicals, angry and resentful to give up their thermodynamics.” I smile timidly a the analogy. 

The quiet comfort we’d felt earlier is gone, disturbed by the intrusion of the nasty scene, which would have been unbearable to go through with anyone but you. Death is not romantic, no matter what the poets say. However, death can be kind of fun to spend with the right person. 

“Come,” you repeat, “lets leave our bodies in the shadows. They’re moving slowly towards the end of their reactions, and there’s nothing we can do know. Lets go where not even thoughts can find us”