To Be Continued (unlike us)

by Charlotte E. Wilde

Reality is merely metaphysical gravel that holds our heavy footsteps anchored to the rotting ground. Foaming peroxide cleanses the actuality of every man (sic) judged right down to the leather of his shoes, all the while pining hopeful that we might strike flint in some[mind] or another for reasons unrelated to the swell of a hip, breast, or lip.

“Sing me a song of my curving intellect, forgive me my platitudes, and make me your cliché,” I begged, pressing the conch shell of this unwitting plea to an unfamiliar ear. Your response, spilling from keys as a deft and lonesome lullaby, coalesced inside a pair of heaving lungs until silence reverently revealed the ocean of a whisper only you could hear. Your words set themselves to music— an unwritten song that swirled like whiskey until I felt its footsteps down my side, caressing vibrations draped in cupid’s bowing quarrel until I screamed at them to stop.

The months swung swift in blinded eyes before reality’s fog revealed to us the glimmering weight of inflation upon a wealth of words. Clarity found in a bird’s-eye-view or panorama of a thought strung so carelessly together with feelings half-alive, half effigy to the ‘what-about-me’s’ claimed for a retrospective demise. From that lofty vantage point on high I saw bloody tongues taste just as sweet but for traces left behind; spelled out secrets in the snow speak not of love, but trumpery and lies. Hers, you thought, ever ready to deflect; irrelevant that they were not in runs both long and short— breathless from exertion twenty sprinting fingers sat on shores, preferring instead to cast stones.

So here we are again, singing along [alone] one last last time, in honor of which I’d like to offer up this tidy obituary to what once was (and never meant to be) but which did and always will stain a psyche technicolor that had before existed only in shades of nuanced drear. And so it goes, solitary midnight minds resort to fantasies afforded to the shoulder of a stranger, awaiting the inevitable falter which will reveal its unfamiliarity at last, a shabby lean-to shelter in an [E]pic storm.

But patience offers one last gift to those with little alternative, hidden in the knowledge that sleep must eventually see fit to turn its head. Here we can be anything, and why not? It’s only make-believe. And so are we— no longer the sum of our parts we reject finite existences made of skin stretched over bone, coalescence forged instead on one electric touch. Obsession silently folds her hand, freeing us of the weight imposed on respective skeletons, pheromones, and the still sulking footsteps of life’s irreconcilable differences. No longer harnessed to physical reality, connections surge faster than blood pumping veins or saltwater swells that washed downcast eyes Sunday morning clean. We’re finally free to build an island of our nothingness— two mental planes of space, ephemeral stratums begot of harmonized stability where love runs thick, expanding as irises in the dark.