Faith felt the
hate,
in the dust beneath her feet.
A
summer dress torn to shreds.
Fractured fingers swelling.
Feet blistered. Head bursting.
Her body was
splitting at the ends.
Far from
the city,
the home of movement,
Faith was unused to the earth
and
the motionless air.
There was no one.
The horizon roared.
Her coiling, curling menace
was contained by empty space
It had begun with
him.
She remembered this now.
She had hurt him
at first by accident,
and in
the end with intention.
Then she'd forgotten him.
She thought
he ended with her memory.
She thought the line between existence and nonexistence
fit
the edge of her inattention.
Out of
a past of his silence
he walked into her present
with
words that exploded.
He robbed her of
friction.
She slipped.
The border of her recollection
began to blur.
Her mantras rearranged
until the meanings were reversed.
Her things lay abandoned.
Her friends could not find her.
But his words followed her.
He called her
to remind her he hadn't moved.
She punched in the payphones,
each one that rang in anticipation of her path.
She staggered
out of touch.
Past where he could touch.
Now Faith crouched beneath the heat.
She'd expected
his absence to cast a shadow
that would cool her rage.
But the desert took no side.
Faith spoke his name in curse
making a rosary of wrath.
The sound flooded forth,
till the flow ebbed and dried.
It trickled into the cracked earth
where no one was listening.
He had chased Faith from sanity
with far greater hate.
Not the hate of mindless movement,
but the hate of
patience.