unedited, unfinished words by myself and Gritchka (noded with permission)
Dropping stones and crumbs to bring a friend home... maybe one day.
Here is what they had: fingers like dropped silk, breaths like clean cotton sheets, hair like children, and lips to mark a trail to the future. In the morning sunshine traced elfish ears, pink-edged with blood, cavernous and rococo; in the late afternoon breeze on the down of their skin and the shadows outside were all that moved. To their surprised and not yet comfortable hearts, each day's discovery was like the sun rising, a kindling.
No more.
Emergence from a dream and a past, or entry into an avenue of solitude, like a tomb of trees and stones? Visions in both directions, silent imaginings and shadows in both. Hic Iacet Arthurus Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus. The promise of return, as labile as any promise, Underneath her, far underneath, as the night flew away with her thoughts and unrolled the continents between, the jewelled golden ropes of a city were submerged in a limitless black ocean. Once, the limitless had been different: I will love you ten thousand. The years and all else, nevers, silence before and silence after.
Complexities layered on complexities. The harder she tried to trace, the faster her mind slid, an endless spectrum of thinkings. It was ghost hands that held out her coat now, when she slipped it on, against the cold blackness of the night. The city below and a promise to be kept; each stair down the steep hillside tonight was nearly accompanied by a silent plea to trip and fall. She was breath-bated already at the prospect. To the bar, where it had begun (although not where it ended - still her mind slipped, beguiled, like the flower with a serpent under it), to a promise kept.
She wants to launch forward and scratch out his eyes; her cup does not even clatter against a betraying saucer as she smiles and places it back down. He notices a silence in the air between them, but looks around for it. Over on the bar there is a conclave of bottles lit up eerily by a votive candle, like cardinals assembled for wickedness. It amuses him. Her company often amuses him, and the places they go. Amused. Went. What is a past relationship but a change of tense? he thinks. He collects them. Like pinned butterflies. Amusements.
She remembers differently, flippancy his alone. The trenchant arguments, the restrained passion, the next morning's teeth so furry they needed to be named and registered with the local council. Living for the moment, endlessly, with the restrained arguments and the trenchant passion. She had suffocated relentlessly. He treated her like a specimen in a laboratory, a fish swimming in endless three-second circles. At times, he would care to break the monotony by tapping on the tank. Reverberations then, and now.