The Hushed Horizon's Golden Glow

Chapter 4: Waves of the Witching Hour

I tolerated its umbra.

Turned out I was just filtering the dusk, hoaxing myself into believing that it was still bright, that I could still swim back to the surface after deep dives into the dark. But I was free-floating, dead-eyed, in a vast void of psyche-destructing phantom pleasures. I wanted to ride Ferris wheels, instead, I dwelt in chasmic crevasse where even the scintillating moon was scorching, still I called it warmth. My will was waning, webs weaving the walls, I was wasted and just waited in waves of wrath and woe. I hugged haunting habits as if it would heal me, despair dressing up as daisies, still I abandoned dandelions and daffodils and danced at its tumultuous circus. I was feigning felicity in the land of lostness, disregarding signs and scribbles, switching sirens off on crossroads, I was murdering magic at midnights, no, I didn't hold onto the vines.

The air was crisp, and my lips were cracked. Vultures, exasperated, slurred with sarcasm. Damn, now I'm paralyzed by blue devils. Fences encrusted with frost; train tickets crawled to crease. Daymares dissing daylight, it's been five years of wondering if the paper planes had been read. What-ifs caterwauling, myths still stampeding in my head, burying flowers I'd been fantasizing, burning lanterns I'd been lurking to get a glimpse of. Wilting gardens remained toom, crystallized lakes craving to be clawed, blank canvases turning beige, no prism of pastels preferred piercing this place.

I'm not the winter woods beneath emerald auroras, I'm the misty forest people thought magical when truly, it's nothing more than mist. You'll be parched and puckered; like dried leaves scratching the pavement. My spirit shelters no kaleidoscope, in midnight blue pigment you'll be dyed, a myriad of cryptic specters haunts this saturnine realm. Aphrodite tops the blacklist, kismet knitted with kiaugh, cupid's victims bruised, no bliss breezing this barren ground. It's a world of wreckage, entailing none of wisterias and willows but of waltzes between wind and withering words. Sullen soliloquies on repeat, trust me, you'd loathe yourself once you're engulfed in this mad melody. Pocket your poetries, love letters jumble on my palm, cascading their way out between the spaces of my fingers, as if I'm a curse meant to grind them to the grains. Find your escape, before you're even caught up, in my midnight parade.

In the midst of this alienation, I found myself clinging onto that orange season. The phosphorescent butterflies of youth's nocturnes, where the fourteenth was so vermillion, and the satellite's silver beams cloaked our sense of time. Cynically pacing back and forth, somewhere beyond the long, winding road, my gaze glued on the gaps. Too late have I realized that karma was arrowing towards me, its shaft engraving my name. I scoffed bitterly; what a breaker I became. I wanted to go back to autumn, but I just know the spikes stand guard before the now majestic, then, Cimmerian woods. The chances were blown, and suddenly, white noises were off sounding. Roses rarely bloom, in the aftermath of a warfare where I volunteered to be the villain.

Ribbons of regret were floating, wrapping around me like I'm a present I'm afraid somebody would open and would be corrupted by this curse I don't have the cure to. I never really learned my lessons, so I was thrown into this karmic loop. And I'm trying to swim my way out of this muddy water, through the waves, amidst the harsh currents, amidst the psychopathic phase. And I didn't want to breathe an archaic pain back to life, or to temporarily sacrifice my present peace in restoration of ancient wars for some ink of bruises and blood, but for the first time in years, again—I wanted to write. A raven that was present in the back of my mind, its pupils appearing like portals into a promised land I never took the act to grasp. Then in its irises, I saw myself. And I think it was time to let the words I caged—

—free. Because the truth is,

I had a hunch, of what was coming. But I put on the blindfolds and picked the metal shield. I watched her pray almost every night, barely sleeping. I watched her pick up that phone call as she was rushing to go to him even though he was seas away. I watched her fall to her knees. I could still hear everything. When she mumbled full of tears, that she's never going to wait for him again every day after work, that she's never going to cook and prepare his favorite food again, that there's no one she'd share meals with anymore, that there's no one she'd talk to anymore. I watched her heart pour out over his coffin. I could still feel everything. I could still see everything. My existence still couldn't process it. All the things I avoided because I couldn't bring myself to take, is where I'm scattered all over, perhaps that's why I couldn't feel whole, perhaps that's why I could never be alright, because I refuse to go back.

The misplacement of my fragments had numbed me.

I wanted to breathe.

That's right.

All of it was real.