m.mcd

“I would be jealous of me if I were anyone else, you know that, right?” she said, her eyes big and wet. I was a head taller than her, so she had to arch her neck back just slightly when we were close. very swan-esque. We had been sputtering out yearnings like that one consistently for about 5 days by then. It made us both feel a little bit better, as we had found something constant in each other that was like a mirror. We had both realized that being around one another had flushed our finest attributes promptly to the surface. I had shed my miserly skin in favor of this sparkling robe fit for kings.

I kissed her forehead gently, and looked out over her head to the cityscape around me. Normally, every intersection was a jostling mess of commuters and vagrants and students all in a blinding hurry of leaving or arriving, but as the sun ducked fully behind the stone buildings, it was like everyone just stopped for a minute to catch their breath with us. Snowflakes spit themselves to the earth and some had made themselves comfortable in her dark hair.

If it hadn’t happened exactly when it happened, this would be a drastically different account. Death had been expansive in the days right beforehand, and it had begun to slowly snake its way to be fully on top of me, constricting. From every angle surrounding, the earth resonated some deep sound of failure, grinding missteps and certainly, rotting despair. It had chilled the city walls most definitely in those days, and it was beginning to seep into my own lungs, as well. I was lying down and I was blending myself into the wet pavement, as everyone else just kept their eyes strategically averted.

But I had found her, I thought. And thus we were hurled into this great jostling of ourselves. All at once days and nights stopped having their respective boundaries and time did slowly sludge itself into her being around and her not being around.

I had called it bad headspace; I even quoted that to her. That’s not what it was. It was desolation, creeping, yeah, but steady as ever. As each moment came and went a little more of that gnawing sadness seemed content to make its home in deep within me, polluting the soft parts of my brain just that much more. I had been made rotten. And there will be no going back. Ever.