Only fiction

“Good night, my--” He stopped, bit his lip, and abruptly left me.

            ― Jane Eyre. 

Often times, caught in the midst of confusion and fury, I dream of vast and infinite paddy fields, or deep troublesome waves over a dark titanic ocean. Last night though, was oddly different.

I woke up in a backyard garden. Petite, and ill prominent as such: with a bare green lawn, mid-sized shrubs in their over-sized zen potteries, and nude paved patios - nothing particularly eerie, or pretty about it to be deemed metaphor to my worries or fears.

But on this soft carpet grass, beneath a sky, speckled with artificial stars, the warmth relaxed me of the chills from my midnight's woe.

I twirled myself around, as if the hills (despite them not being there) were alive. Surprised, almost, that I had forgotten I had come here with company - or at least, tried my best to - I caught you boasting a smile.

A smile I hadn't seen in so long. A smile I thought I'd had lost. A smile I thought was no longer mine.

You drew our distance smaller. My relief, that - in the glory of this simple solitude - was once left bare, and out, naked in the open, felt tarnished - invaded.

In the space between us, the wind whistled; Between us, there was nothing more but the aura of your presence and mine: lay there no cracks or rugged edges, it was clean, and polished, like new shoes or like floored marble - I could have put my hand out and probably feel your skin without even touching you.

For once, I'd much rather to have been swept away by deep ocean ripples, or even lost endlessly in open fields - rather you steal my breath with water, or kill my thoughts barren dead - anywhere, but here.

But here, before you, my stomach fluttered with wings. Time stopped, and the brimming noise from a crowd away, was silenced numb. I could hardly breathe, but I doubt I had even needed to. I felt immortal.

Here, in a world without space or time, without gravity or air, nor sound, nor rhyme or reason - here, you pumped by heart with ecstasy; filled my lungs with memories; damped my eyes with melancholy.

I think a song began to play somewhere in a distance that could only be measured in eons. We danced there. Beneath the moon, and the lacing of light bulbs, barefoot, on the grass behind a house I wasn't sure belonged to whom, to a song I can't remember the tune of.

In the comfort and confusion, my soul wept against your chest.

"We're alright."

But we weren't. And you knew it. You were keeping your tears away, collecting mine to mask them: you had them slipped inside your back pocket, but I caught your lie beneath the smile you struggled so desperately to hold.

You could've kissed me with those lips and I'd have died of its poison.

But what is death if I could have one last time to meet your mouth again? Your mouth, stripped without its words that so long pushed me away, without its voice that lulled my nights lonely: your mouth whom I'd kiss forever if I could.

The wind blew, and there it was: the distance again.

We didn't really dance. Perhaps I only made it up because I wished so badly we could have.

Maybe things would've been a lot different waking up had we did.

Though I suppose that doesn't matter. I could throw away all my questions of what could have been, but I'll still always be left with knowing that it just never was.

But oh.

Darling, if only.