“I’ll miss you.”
You had pulled me against your chest and I was crushed by the avalanche of grief. I shuddered and I felt the tears slip onto your shoulders; it was only September but it was so cold already.
“I’ll see you soon.”
I clutched at the lifeline around my neck and watched you steer towards highways and bars and mountains that would not allow me to pass through. I waved, but you were already gone.
The smoke filled up my lungs.
* * *
I nudged the earbuds further into my ear and cracked my fingers in the stifling air. I couldn’t hear the sounds, but I could feel the snaps of the escaping air reverberate through my veins. It was like a desperate cannon fire or the last sputtering ember. It devoured the emptiness and left the absence more wrecked than before, like a mine explosion over a sunken ship.
I heard once that cracking your fingers would give you arthritis. Even now I’m not sure if that’s true or not, because everyone tells me different things. IF that were true though, I’d be screwed to arthritis damnation. But that’s the best part—even if that were true, I wouldn’t quit. There are worse things, and ignorance is bliss.
The constitution for my life existed on the basis of fighting. Fighting for the last lap in the chlorine pool, fighting for that minimal score to get the A in the class, fighting for a right to my own life. I fostered an apathy in those battles, and slowly cataracts covered my eyes and I did not know why I was fighting for anything at all. I was just belligerent, manifested by an unswerving will to destroy, to rebel, to denounce.
I craned my neck a little towards the window to ease the ache there. I shifted my eyes toward the road and my breath caught in my throat.
The clouds were separated from the horizon by a froth of golden waves tinged with rose. They moved in an immense mass carved out of the spools of wind and mist and they loomed over the sky like a ship crafted from the tides themselves. Streaks of violet scorched the orange and a few stars peeked out toward the east, like the eyes of fawns shrouded by the lamp posts. I could not see the sun but there was a bleached halo probing over the edge of the road. And rising from its sleep was the moon, only a tiny slice but unbearably imposing, the largest temple in the celestial expanse.
You were probably there right now, stretching your arms past the iridescent fog and catching stardust in the palm of your hand. You belonged there, with the rest of the world miles from your feet, too glorious to be touched by any of the filth the rest of us treaded on. And the sky that I saw and the sky that you were, I’ve always loved them both, they were always one and the same.