It goes without saying that we met under the spell of innocence. Walking along the road that seemed to stretch in all directions as an asphalt steppe, hand in hand, the sun setting from the brilliant white of childhood summer to a dying afternoon. The whole world wreathed in grandfatherly gold, gilt flake from an earlier century coating ornately carved pillars of each villa and castle of our memories and ancestries, the simple music enjoyed only in earliest youth and oldest wisdom of chirping birds through opened windows. We had separated somewhere down the street, into our own alleys. From my window, I watched a wedding, grandfather beside me in that chair he rotted in. Two held hands and joined beneath a gazebo. I saw love and adulthood and heard the vulgar-sounding instrumentations of Vivaldi down flower lined paths. Feet trampled into stone and made an ugly discordant sound. The old man looked at me knowingly. I looked back down onto the garden and saw in horror, the future.
When she was gone - my friend, my friend who I last saw under that golden sunlight - it was without ceremony. Like we were lost in fog, we were walking along until our attempts to pathfind took invisible divergences and we slipped away, disintegrating into nothing. I cried silently, invisibly. A friend looked over my shoulder down onto my diary and I fled to hide the ink.
An outside observer called it tremendous pain. I checked in on her later. I saw her mind, a tempest in a teapot, as waves swirled grey and angry within the enclosure of her skull, her body still on the mass transit. She was beyond the reach of the canyons I was used to, only touching the city in its purest crystalline heart, never seeing the gridlock wilderness she ventured through, making circuits in streets that hated her. I saw the sky - grey. I saw red bricks bleached grey. I saw sidewalks and asphalt. I saw a horizontal world of empty lots and desolate parking spaces around a river that meandered a battleship blue growing greenbrown with every little drop of pollution.
I submitted. When I began drinking I dove into the forest, anticipating that dark point where the green turned black and I was lost in shadow. I saw her becoming grey and I fled from stone - or was kept from it. Neither of us would ever find gold again, except when a mirror was given to us. Both of us passed in the hallway of the same prison, when we had been found trying to claw the molten gold of our eyes clear from the sockets.
Sometimes it happened when the sun was low in the summer, heat foretold in the sparkles of the dewdrops on the grass, every blue, yellow, and green - all those acrylic colors - coming alive under a sun that seemed almost fluorescent. My father stepped into the sleek black car and departed. I saw the heat come up as the winding drive disappeared into the final shadowed archway before it opened onto the street. I came up against the gate and leaned into the bars.
Oh yes - we are the dead. Parasites that passed each other from across the field. I used to wake up in a cold sweat. I was wearing my nightgown and I imagine so was she. Not so in the battlefield’s sky, where between grey and green all tinged bloody-brown we were wearing opposite colors. It had come to this. We both knew it would. We wanted the same thing and God had given us diverging paths to finding it. The destination was identical, two opposite ends of a palatial heaven. We would arrive in splendor speaking foreign tongues after meeting one final time, under that garden gazebo, uniforms ripped open, a long tension of two monads where none were ever destined to exist. We occupied one space only, one that would only allow void to exist within itself, an annihilation we had to inflict on each other - insurance that we would both honor it. We awake lost from these dreams. I in the countryside, she in the city. I look out upon a nature so alive as to threaten my life. She looks out upon life hypertrophied to the point of cold grey death.
I walk along a desolate road, a raised brown gravel path, the brown steppe of dead grass rolling out like a blanket patched with clumps of snow in the low places where it never melted. The sky is a uniform grey, the kind that comes with everyday Northern cold, where a firmament from horizon to peak is formed. The wind blows against my hair and the fur on my hat. My wool coat is stained with the smell of tobacco and gunpowder, and I hope to turn my white shirt bloody with wine. A shotgun is broken in that forty-five degree lambda over my forearm. I walk with boots on. It’s muddy on either side of me in the ditch, frozen over by the cold. The sun is a barely visible disc of stifled light somewhere in the haze of the sky above. A bird squawks up as it darts from the landscape. Against the deathly sky, I pull the trigger. My body and head rock with the recoil and noise. Blood pours from the little wounds when I collect the corpse. I look up as I crouch down. I know I will never see the sun again.
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