The squeaking of my shoes on the tiles below are screams I cannot release by mouth. The fluorescent light bouncing on the floor makes for short standing shadows of feet and voiceless thoughts. Demi's hand clenches mine as they swing between us. Luggage rolls on wheels as it nips at her heels while her sketchers fight to keep the pace. I want to ask if I'm translating the messages within actions in the right language, but I give in to the broken silence. I want to pick her brain and crescent lips to see if I can find the same stir of emotions in her as in me. However, I do not. We've already had those conversations and one more acknowledgement of a farewell is
reshattering a fine wine glass.
When we get to her gate it is roughly one thirty in the morning and the brown eyed beauty folds herself into my lap. With nothing else to do, I try counting her freckles to pass the time. I'm on the twenty seventh when I suddenly become aware to the fact that I haven't had this opportunity in quite some time. Maybe because hiding is safest for her. Crawling under covers in the dark keeps the monsters away and a knife under those covers keeps them at bay. For once in a very long while, all weapons are drawn, it's saddening it's burying a hatchet simply because of a goodbye. I wanted it to be different. All of this. I wanted to travel the world with her, raise a family with her, kiss her, love her. Now that time has passed, and when she returns I will work for a second chance I do not deserve.
Despite only wanting sleep, her big brown eyes find the energy to look up at me to say what she doesn't want to say. Her eyes dance around the dim light left in her soul and I feel like I can see her ancestors dancing around a fire for a sun dance. Masks matching war painted skin gleam in all their filthy glory until-
Demi blinks, and I nod in response. Tears push their way through and sit in the creases of her eyes as she looks away and kisses the back of my hand before closing her eyes. I ruffle her hair slowly and kiss her temple, sure not to bump her. Even though I don't let her see it, I'm tearful too. It's been a while since she's slept on me without tensing up. She didn't sleep in the same house as me for a week after I lost it. I laid awake for hours, days on end crying about how I'm not only losing her but myself as well. I don't want my girlfriend not being able to sleep because she's worried about me cutting her up into pieces and selling her to butcher shops as hamburger meat simply because I can't handle life.
I should get arrested for fleeing the scene of a crime scene and for concealing evidence. My hands may be clean but it took bottles upon bottles of soap to scrub the blood off my palms and the sweat from my fingernails. It took tubes upon tubes of toothpaste to dilute the taste of tear jerking words from my mouth. Even though we have cleaned up the mess it does not change the scenery of naked knife threats in the bedroom and screaming matches in the car. The pills may be down the toilet but the memory is still sitting on the sink. I can not scratch these mistakes out with razor blades, they are the scars on my arms and the bags under her eyes. Undoable.
I try and I try and I try but love is a cold and broken hallelujah. Love is blinding. Love is love, and nothing can replace love with something artificial. It's a drug, really. It's like marijuana. It usually grows on you with time and slowly you want and need more. Only in extreme cases does it kill you. Even though it's not possible, I want love to kill me, with a pillow or an axe it's all the same. I want to hold her not squeeze her, but I just can't seem to be gentle. My awareness is the sad buggy and her patients is the highway. I'm just a little speck but the pressure of me and the worlds Gravity is cruising all over her.
"You know, it could be worse. Us. There are all kinds of horror stories about relationships gone wrong where I grew up", Demi mumbles into me, her voice vibrating my skull and reaching out to me ears.
"They aren't about you. They aren't about me either, so it's just not the same. Everyone has a different horror".
"Natalie", Demi warns, "please shut the fuck up".
"But I want to scream", I smile.
"Why?"
"It's too quiet out here, it's too loud up where you can't hear, maybe there could be a trade off".
"Silence is deafening", Demi states matter-of-factly. It's a simple memory and a simple sentence but I hear metal on metal with every syllable and with the spaces between the words there are banshee cries. I feel the heat of the kitchen in the diner rush my face like the heat of an argument. Suddenly I can't breathe, the feeling in my fingertips are lost as my blood runs cold. My mind is in a free fall but I can't contemplate it because I'm sitting right here.
I want to answer but her breathing evens out until I drop her off in her seat on the plane and whisper "love doesn't quit on love", before walking away from something I don't know will be mine again.
----------------------------------------------I cut it short, I apologize. I'll try to make the next chapter longer. Got an idea for a new story? Let me know!
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Two Eyes Down: Nearsighted
Teen Fiction(Reading book one, Two Eyes Down, is strongly suggested) Natalie isn't blind anymore, but when she has to walk back into her life with sight not having it before, she might as well have been. She still has the life she did before, with friends and...
