Save me
Excerpts from Forgotten...
Disoriented and woeful, I feel like a butterfly pinned, whose wings have been torn helpless. My heart beats static while my mind drowns in inertia.
Every single day I'm forced to watch you die through a screen of sheer tempered glass. I would rather it was an opaque, impenetrable fortress so that you wouldn't see me fail, failing to save you from your inevitable fate.
I meet you in different worlds, different dimensions, a patchwork so intricate and beautiful, a sycamore illusion spun by death Herself. And just like the one standing before a shelf of books with dissimilared covers, I hope that each narrates a different tale, an identical beginning with a divergent end. I guess I wasn't as fortunate, for every epilogue I read, the words marked your demise.
The transparency of this compulsion robs me of my being, it hurt seeing through something I could never quite touch even if it enveloped my existence like a cage. I realize I have lost you when I reach out only to find myself alone; I realize I have lost you when I recollect our memories in eons and dwindling days—every moment, every second. I realize I have lost you when I hear a voice akin to yours, yet I know with all my heart it couldn't possibly be you.
And then I see you again, another contortionist who bears a soft smile to your lips. You tell me with that honeysuckle voice, you want me to give in, to stop feeling, to forget... you. Through these eyes of misperception, the face I see is certainly yours while the words aren't, just like a colloquy mismatched. You look like a statue of yourself, sculpted by someone who doesn't know you at all, the way your mouth curved into a tender knowing smile, the corners of your sparkling eyes creasing elatedly at the sight of me. It's like trying to find lost pieces of you buried under a sandstorm of effusing personas, I have begun to feel as if I'm losing you all over again, yet I know I will never stop loving till I remember.
The floor behind me crumbles, collapsing to gravel and dust, a black vortex that devours the universe, every inch that intervenes its path. My steps hasten as I gasp for air, my palm colliding into the sturdy wall, a dead end, the fortress to my freedom.
The lifeless stone column, stoic it stands, rendering me with raw bloody knuckles and no escape. With trembling breaths and cold sweat that beads the nape of my neck, I let out a strangled cry, gritting my teeth at the sharp aching fire as my fist connects to stone for the last time—I have failed again. The ground beneath jolts and rumbles, as spidering cracks claim their way around the marble rapidly.
With my back pressed against the barrier and the sinkhole snarling in victorious ruination. I finally discern what an inevitable death felt like—biased, timeless and ineffable. Before I could comprehend, before I could sketch you in my mind, the world disintegrates to plumes, plummeting down into a headlong dive, a pitch yawning well of nothingness.
There is no sky, there is no earth, just an immense whirlwind that lulls me in its shadowy embrace, my arms flailing in the midst of darkness. They swirl and twist with a voice of their own, a silhouette shaping into you. Your hands cup my face with undenying warmth, "Why are you afraid when I promised to stay, you haven't forgotten, have you?"
I soak it all in, your sun-kissed cheeks, that tender knowing smile, you take my wounded hands, our fingers intertwine, my blood staining your rosy lips, a sinless kiss over raw cuts and bruises. "They can't hurt you now." Your voice, a deluge of rain over a worn landscape, the sound of waves over weeping shores, a prophecy, a promise of life ... and I listen.
A lure, a bargain made wrong as icy tendrils close over flesh and bone, slithering green-eyed serpents writhe under my skin like bullets, as I bleed through the night, falling apart like pieces of a broken urn, mud disintegrating to powder with every touch. You aren't here anymore, not a single trace that you had been. You've left me alone to die just like I did among smothering shadows that buried you alive. As time fades my guilt begins to feel insignificant as darkness sutures back my broken pieces with thorns and ash, annihilating my soul.
You have begun to haze like a photograph kept for too long, weathered by rain and summer. The day has arrived, a quiet realization dawning upon me that every existing ounce of humanity subsisting within has withered to dust.
How could I ever be saved when I'm a shadow trapped inside something that drowned with you, how could I be free when you were the only answer I needed to hear, how could I love, for my heart beats no more, not even for you.
Perfectly crafted!
I loved the ending✨