‘you don’t know what it feels like to be this alone,’ she says one afternoon and he laughs out loud. he looks her in the face and he laughs, even as she cringes and looks away. 
‘i don’t?’ he asks when she frowns and she shakes her head like she really believes it.
‘sweetheart,’ he says without patience, his voice low as it sinks heavy around the truth, ”alone’ is the only word you could possibly use to accurately describe the human condition.’ 

there is no warmth left in the wrecked, cobbled streets of cherbourg. the air thicker, dustier, somehow cruel - toxic even. the city groans, worn-thin by bombs and mortar fire, and, in the earliest hours of the smoky evening, a building collapses in on itself without any witnesses. not far off, several minutes later, a girl stumbles in the street and a drawn gasp shatters the stillness around her, disrupts the delicate balance of things. she is too thin beneath her jacket, too fragile - as if her bones are made of glass and her face constructed solely of the finest porcelain. where she was once soft curves she is now sharp angles and hard edges - once upon a time, she might have bent to fit the molds of a foreign body, the dips and valleys of her bone-structure just shallow enough that the peaks of another might fit seamlessly into the forgiving spaces there. but now she is made to stand apart, the unforgiving edges of her body might repel the advances of another and she doesn’t dream about possibilities now. she does not fantasize about the artist who might pluck her from this war-torn city and deliver her safely to the peaks of snow-dappled mountains. instead, she dreams only of the sweet-eyed man who had instilled a desperate, haunting hope in her faltering heart. it is his absence that has drawn the color from her face and has drained the life from her sea-blue eyes. it is rare that she manages to pull herself from the window and the streets outside seem even more forlorn with every hour passes without him. a physical ache has blossomed in her chest by now, a knife has long since separated her ribs and sinks deeper into her side when her thoughts shift in the wrong direction. 

still, she vividly remembers the electricity in his touch and the earthy weight of him, the thoroughly intoxicating smell of him. she remembers the thrum of his heartbeat and how his arms had kept he from evaporating into the atmosphere. these are the things that visit her most often when she’s least expecting them - when she’s fetching water from the cellar and a whisper of wind slips across the nape of her neck like silken fingertips, when she catches the faintest shimmer of blue on glass, when a tremor steals down the length of her rocky spine without inspiration. she keeps these memories close, tucked neatly into the empty space beside her heart so that when her pulse becomes too erratic they might somehow soothe the staccato beat. 

but the streets are cold and murky in this light, the late-autumn sun hanging low over the horizon, and the shadows cast across the stone troubles her in the deepest, most primal way. idly, she trails her fingertips gingerly along the brick faces of the bombed-out buildings that had once stood proud beside the street and the simple act keeps her anchored in the present because, even now, she’s afraid she might just drift away. she has become something akin to vapor and there is a dream-like quality to the way she moves now, each muscle working individually to construct motion, function. there is no reason left for her to exist in this ruined city, this city savagely torn apart by enemy gun-fire, its beauty brutally destroyed. 

where the war had once been far removed from her, now she can swear it thrives in the cavern of her chest. the tides of war sweep across her heart and she finds herself suddenly caught in the rip current. she had been able to hide behind her dancing and the carefully locked doors for so long that she feels foolish now to have believed she was ever safe from it. 

it is then, swept up in the memory of a man long gone, that she stumbles over a lone brick on the sidewalk and sucks in a sharp breath - startled, abruptly and cruelly snatched from her reverie by cold reality. she hesitates for a split instant before shifting backward, longing for home - but home is not the house waiting for her anymore, home is the arms that physically held her for only a single, fleeting moment in time but have yet to relinquish their steadfast grip on her. 

what’s the word for that gut-wrenching feeling that comes along with learning a truth you never really wanted to know in the first place?
that sick, anxious, world-turned-upside-down feeling you get when you find out the truth wasn’t really the truth at all. 
how can you know someone so long and never really know them at all?
how can you be so insufferably wrong about someone?
in the end, though, those things must be easy to understand.
what is not so easily understood is how someone can destroy another person on a cellular level and still look at them and smile.
the hardest thing of all, though, is to stand up and say, ‘because of you, i will never be okay again’. 

his staggered breath turns to dust-vapor in the coldest hours of winter. his heart stutters and slows in the hollow of his chest while he watches the earth open up, spades slicing through frozen ground to unravel the stitches of root and eroded rock. it’s an open wound on the face of an abused alien planet, a wound that matches the infectious, festering wound at his core.
‘you’ll have to leave,’ they’ve said and will say again. but his hands remain pressed, clenched, in the murky depths of his pockets. he’ll finger the locket tucked safely there and he’ll remember the life that once contained it. and his feet have taken root by now and they do not stir when asked.
his is steadfast, even when the south wind whispers through the cemetery trees and lays silken fingertips along the nape of his neck so that the hair there stands on end. he is the guardian of her under-world tomb of aging wood and faulty hinges. from here, he swears he can hear the earth swallowing her whole.
for him, it was always easier to remember than it was to forget.

she would have said that those words made her want to feel and i would have said quite the opposite.
‘be careful what you wish for,’ she might have said with her camera-shutter sigh and her hazy, candle-flicker smile.
but it wouldn’t have mattered because i already spent all my wishes on you.
you are a nest of bones and sinew and i want nothing more than to be the bird meant to live in your murky depths.
you are whispers in the dark, silken breath against satin flesh. you are the voice in my head, a smoky tenor meant only for me.
‘life never meant much to me,’ she told me once and i took her by the hand, kissed her on the wrist, and allowed for my eyes to smile.
‘life never meant much to any of us,’ i told her while she turned her sea-water stare toward the sky. she never believed the things i told her but i never did either.
‘but death means less,’ i went on to say while i gathered flower petals in the palm of my hand.
‘death seems friendlier,’ she said then and i turned to her, showered the petals over her head and she tipped her chin back to catch one in her mouth. she held it between her lips while i watched.
‘death is lonelier,’ i said while the petal disappeared down her throat.