How strange it is to be haunted by someone still alive.
How strange it is to live a life so different than her dreams.
So different than her reality.
At least, as it was, just months (has it already been months?) ago.
This was not the life she was supposed to live.
She still can hear the strong cadence of his chuckle, and the smile it brought to her lips each time he laughed.
She still can feel the tender touch of his embrace, a joyous blanket of love and warmth that she held oh so close.
She still can smell the aroma of his dark coat, so virile and faintly pungent (what boy doesn’t reek, after all?).
She recalls them all fondly. She recalls them bitterly.
She is still affectionate; she is vengeful.
She wishes the best for his future; she hopes he suffers, that he aches with an agony a thousand-fold what he gifted her.
And so she runs.
She runs, for days… for weeks… for months… She runs through forests and jungles and deserts and beaches and plains and bayous and mountains, and still she runs. She runs with no objective, with no destination, but to forget him. She runs from him.
She wants to remember him. But she wants to forget. She needs to forget.
And slowly, she does. She is still numb (a woman’s heart can never fully heal), but his image grows hazier and the pain grows fainter. She still recalls the love, but the memory becomes more and more like a dream. Did it even happen? Was it even real? It was, but it isn’t. Not anymore.
This is, she realizes, her new normal.
And how fitting it is that her realization arises as she skids suddenly to a halt, an iron maiden silhouetted against a blood red sky. For what is a sunrise if not a rebirth? And what is Beqanna, if not the land of the sunrise?
chalmette
SHE EXHALES VANILLA LACE