Lies Without Reflections

4. Chapter

So we sat in the living room, the flashing light of the TV illustrating the furniture with black and white shadows, the volume turned down, listening to his lungs converting air.

“Can you tell me what happened?” he asked stifled curiosity in his voice.

I sat barefoot, my knees drawn up, chin resting on my legs, using my lungs to know if I still could. They functioned alright.

“My parents died”

This wasn't the answer he sought for but he cloaked his disappointment.

“Whatever is happening it started with that, that much I know.”

“I'm sorry”

“I know. Everyone is. That's not much of a help, though”

His head fell, he avoided my eyes.

“That wasn't fair to say. I can't thank you enough for what you've done”

“It's okay. Anyone would've done it”

“And still it was only you who actually had”

A long silence. It was almost funny how I had come to like screaming as an automatic reflex for frustration.

“So…” his voice tentative “is it going to be like this from now on?”

I grunted.

“No one has returned from the dead as far as I know”

I almost choked on the irony. Almost.

“You know what I mean”

The flickering light made a sharp fold of his jawline.

I shook my head.

“Do you?”

He blinked at me blankly.

“When will you tell her?”

I stared at the mute figures moving on with their lives on the screen ignorant disregarding my pain.

“Probably never” I said “She deserves to know, I know that. It's just I can't decide which is the bigger cruelty; having her believe in something that doesn't exist or depriving her of belief entirely”

What our parents were I could never replace. I was a sorry excuse for a parent, adult, right then a human being.

I couldn't think of the couple. If I did his heartbeat became more prominent against the hollow silence of my chest.

“It's not that she's not strong enough or ready to hear it. There's no perfect time to break news like this to anyone. It's that I'm not...” Ready? Strong? What did it matter?

Funny how we think pain is the worst part of suffering. We never acknowledge that there's a part beyond pain that is worse. Numbness.

You think pain is the final destination up to the point where the train squeaks with a metallic screech and rolls onward.

Pain is a better stop than numbness. Because you can scream, you can cry, you have the ferocity and anger to break to tear. Pain is a loud, extroverted suffering. Pain is animate. Numbness is frozen. It's the eternal walk in the fog, the place of invisible agony. Silent, unmoving, smothering. It kills you softly with an unspoken grin on its face rather than stab you violently with a battle cry.

“Do you know how tempted I am to run?” I asked him.

“Why don't you? You could take your aunt's offer.” He truly believed that as an option. Deep in the pit of my stomach the uneasy stirring convinced me of the same. Doesn't mean I didn't reject it at the hand. I couldn't help but think of the imaginary monster who'd only say 'Then run' and would relieve me of my ordeal.

“I'm not going back”

“It's not for you. It's because of your sister. You could swallow your pride for once and think for her”

His heartbeat hammered in my ears as my rage welled up.

“I'm thinking for her! That's why I want to run. I considered giving her to the authorities, to my aunt, even to you if some emergency arose” I said, standing, biting my nails and pacing“ but if I can't forgive them for leaving me then so can't she”

“It was an accident” his voice was so calming I wanted to slap him. Then I thought of his drumming blood filling the place on his cheek my palm connected with and I gulped down a lump of drool. I couldn't have him throwing rationalities at me when my head was churning with insanity.

“I can't abandon her” I hissed through my teeth “Who else is there left? However vile and lousy it's me at the end”

He looked at me, looked at the commercial box, the door, the drawn curtains, then he sighed.

“What now?”

“That seems to be the question of the week” I muttered “Let me think”

If only the delectable beating of his chest would hush for a minute...

How could he not see that I was the worst person for her to be related to? That fact that he refrained from running never ceased to amaze me. When people started to get close, when they stepped another in my way, I reflected and they saw my truth; upon witnessing it they ran. That was the time of them seeing all that was of me; a crumbling mould with a beating heart implanted, resonating its nerves into action. Now that it encaged the frozen flutter of troubled solace there was nothing left to motivate my limbs into movement. Although everything formidable emerged I consisted of, the matter that made them run surfaced, chasing away one that looked upon it.

It was evident that I had to live day by day. Mayfly-life. Brilliant. Suddenly I felt all the burden smash me; an anvil dropped from the top of the Shard. The list of how life was falling apart just grew in longitude by the second.

The reality of my imprisonment hit me.

The fist that clamped down on my chest twisted something with a crushing force, when my throat clenched I knew its name: panic.

I fought it down and shaped thoughts that were sort of kind of coherent. Spewed them successfully and registered that he nodded and sounded like he agreed. Although I probably solved next day's problem the squeeze didn't budge.

He sensed my distress when we ran out of speculations and the electric silence of my stillness evolved into an unsettling hum.

I couldn't ask him to say. It's enough that I put her in jeopardy by being in the house. It wasn't right to ask that of him. I still did.

He wouldn't. He had to go.

He waited until I put her to sleep. We hugged in the doorway. My ribs exhaled with relief for being able to relax when his arms took over the job of holding me together instead of them. Even if only for half a minute. But they disappeared too fast and I felt the bones strain as clasps to be locked.

I listened to the clamour of her breathing and heartbeat braiding into one another creating a spirally pattern in the empty space.

My mind, a bug eating itself, frantically ran circles, clog-clog-clogging, trying to find an exit before the roof collapsed on my head. I was chasing my shadow. Pointless. The one thing it couldn't be.

What woke me I had no clue. I didn't realize I was asleep to begin with.

The curtain blown by the wind, I didn't remember opening the window.

He was a prince in panther-skin, languidly perched, painted greyscale by the gossamer moonlight.

The eyes, those ageless, colourless eyes. Once you've seen them, believe me, you wouldn't mistake them in a hundred years.

For some unfathomable reason I didn't scream. I probably was paralyzed by the unearthly fine specimen dominating the room by doing nothing but sitting still.

He disappeared once more behind the flapping curtain then reappeared again.

I sat, joints, muscles howling. Petrified, bedded in cement.

“You're welcome”

For some reason I trembled at his voice. I never truly believed he was real.

He went on.

“In case you didn't know.”

I shivered hard. It wasn't on account of the air hauled in by the night-time.

“I needed help” a low squeal.

“And you got it” he nodded slightly. Half of his face shrouded in shadows, his eyes shone sipping the colour of the silver light.

“You made me into something like you”

A soft scoff. He looked away.

“We're nothing alike. I made you to my likeness, yes. That indicates no similarity” he waved a graceful white hand to emphasize his words. I couldn't register how something could be this jaw-droppingly ethereal. As if he practiced moving so many times he perfected it, his way of gesticulation being the epitome, our peasant stirrings only a dusty copy of his gestures.

“You made it worse” I accused him, though it sounded like an apology. My mouth became its own entity, my nerves severed fleeing from my brain to my lips, for if I thought, I wouldn't have been able to speak.

“Is that right?” his voice, the night air, cool and omnipresent, the clear sound of a water-filled crystal glass.

I swallowed, dread scurrying down my spine.

“I can't leave the house”

You signed my sentence. Death-warrant. You should know how you made life impossible. Literally.

His eyes glinted, an iridescent blade of a knife.

“I see it differently”

He shifted ever so slightly on the desk, left his arms dangling between his thighs. Perfectly comfortable.

“As I see it I'm the saviour who solved all your problems in one night. Therefore” he nodded imploringly “you should be on your knees kissing my feet for the grace I bestowed on you. That's” he said “how I see it”

“How? Why?” I croaked my throat parched all of a sudden.

Those feral eyes sized me up then fixed on my face as if they found what they were looking for but were quite unsure whether they should look the way they looked.

Then he shrugged.

“Everyone likes to have fun”

I didn't know how I conjured up the ability or the courage to talk. Nothing else moved but my lips. I avoided blinking as if the infinitesimal pause in sight would grant him a chance to—to do what exactly?

“What are you doing here?” I tried not to hear the catch in my voice.

“Having the other half of the fun, obviously” he said matter-of-factly, flashing his eyes at me. He took me in again from top to toe. Still not seeming to find what he had sought for.

“What are you doing?” I exclaimed exasperated, glad it sounded angry and fierce. My insides restlessly trembled in fear.

A grin that outshone the moon.

“Contemplating”

The words wedged themselves into my throat. Why I was so motionless, I couldn't know. Fear seeped into me slowly to singe my body into a shaking mess, and I let the hook of insanity sank deeper into flesh until I heard the clank of bone.

“Let's see what the blondie is up to, shall we?”

He pushed himself off so swiftly it swept me into vertigo. With a soundless battle cry I flung myself after him through the door. It squeaked and landed with a thud on the frame, a boom of thunder in the murky stillness. I left my heavy, charred heart behind.

Inches from her, contoured in silver he inhaled the breath my sister exhaled.

I knew what was coming.

He bared his teeth, the hunger tensing his whole body. A twin surge of thirst ravaged me along with him. Thinking of his jaw clamping down on my sister soft neck...

My muscles unbound burnt with the force of the lunge I made into her room to thaw this ancient creature with the dead, dead eyes out-out-out. With a loud creak I landed on him. Something set abuzz around us. I realized it was my throat.

Up close he's a marble statue than a living construction of flesh and bone, of dream and craving. Smooth and unbroken, though examined closely I found the small scathing of every tick of the chisel blanketing him, a crosshatched painting on its own.

Childishly I was mesmerized, forgetting for a moment, forgetting why, how and what. Just stared into the fathomless void that stood witness to the infinite wisdom hurling itself into the abyss to be lost. It couldn't bear the existence of living, that stood by while universes collapsed, small and gargantuan ones with his limbs tied into one another to twist him with agony for being nothing, just that, a witness. The absence of colour, the centuries old missing, longing, pleading, the treading of the same circle that narrowed, shrank until the last step trod on vacant space. It all washed out the shades, hues of his irises.

I was falling like he had been for so long, time had feigned to stop, the fall became floating, after all what was the difference when Cronos itself stepped into the black emptiness. How could you tell the difference when you forgot what difference meant?

I trembled when I raised a thumb to stroke away the dust that settled under his eyes because he kept them open for more than he should have. Not because he didn't want to close them, because he couldn't. He was a chained man screaming for his freedom.

My fear vanished and lingered at once.

“Why?” I breathed at the blank face. A shiver ran down my spine.

The smallest of jerks twitched his lips.

“You will learn that each of your questions are already answered before they leave your lips”

I frowned but didn't budge. I felt the silence under my fingertips as I pressed him harder against the carpet. Averting my eyes I looked to the right.

“I see them, you know”

The featureless mask remained listless but roamed over me again leaving the footprint of its rays behind. Weighted, slow treads. You felt the pressure after they had moved on.

“All the ravines, crevices, fissures...”

Eyes widening I sucked in a breath, leaning back.

He didn't rise, didn't move just gloated at the ceiling.

Blinking away the chill that settled in gradually, I breathed.

“You can't” I told him and I shivered as I imagined my sister, blue, drained of blood, white as a paper painted with watercolour just a hint of colour left here and there to indicate what used to be was no more.

“I wanted you to move. You knocked yourself into shock the moment you awoke” he explained, a doctor reassuring the panicking patient “Your mind locked your muscles down” he added, clarifying what I already knew.

I wanted him to say that of course he won't, that he didn't do this to me to rid me of the only reason I endured, the sole string I had left and hung onto dangling above the cosmic abyss against a star speckled dark sky.

“How will you help me then?”

“How indeed”

He lay there completely relaxed, only the yawning void blinking out of him facing the chalky heavens.

“What are you?” I whispered.

“Sin” the word like a sigh of a prayer.

“So am I, then” I reasoned. I wondered whether he was as aware of my sister's heartbeat as I was. He gave no sign of it if he was.

“Not one thing is the same as another”

I listened to the air escaping, washing up and down his spine.

“Selfish”

He blinked twice, thinned his lips.

“Is that why you—helped me?” I tried hopelessly to grasp his line of thought if he had any.

A beat of hush. Two. Three.

“I wanted to have fun”

He was looking at me, through me and somehow against the tide of dread barely contained in my body I felt that the key to my redemption had arrived. All I had to do was turn it in the lock. Scrambling off him, the boards creaked under the dust crusted carpet.

His lips slashed a crazed grin on his face as he extended his hand to me.

A handshake with the Devil. No contract needed, it was as tangible as a vow, an oath by drawn blood, a gate of no return. What was there to refuse? I had abandoned all my hope what seemed like decades ago.

I didn't take it. I went with him.

Through the doorways, fences, rooftops, listening to the call only we could hear, the beat that was only absent from our chests.

With every light fading in a pair of eyes, a pair of twin stars blown out, swept from the velvet of the night I gained more and more life back. Nothing came without a price. My soul for theirs, an irrevocable trade, chaining me to the red filth that stained my skin, coated my nails, swallowed me whole.

Realities hit me that had never occurred to me before. How the hunger induced wild hunt sanctified running under the copper dotted blanket of the rich blackness. How I never tasted freedom so acutely that it laced into my skin sending echoes of delicious shivers to resound in me. How no one could see me while I was running because I became the essence of me - that was the essence of everything— nothing, and in speed, in this accelerating existence I ceased to be. How the lightless world illuminated, how the shadows glowed, how the deepest consuming darkness was an opening, the brightest spot. The cruel night taught me all its controversies, enhanced my contradictions, elevated my confusion to clarify everything. Purify with darkness, blood, the wail of all lights put to sleep, spiralling into a tainted place where the desecrated were saints, the lost, adventurers and the sinners an avenging shackled God. We were the silence lurking in the night, stepping into rooms, filling empty solaces, settling on the shoulders of graves.

I looked at him, half my face grinning, half twisted. A mind divided against itself is as good as broken, I told myself.

“Is this forever?”

He turned to me, regarding me carefully with his bottomless eyes, cautiously so I wouldn't fall too deep into them.

“The only thing forever, is that humanity cannot comprehend the measure of infinity”

Right.

“What about us?” I stood his stare.

“What is infinity if it's a hollow stretching out indefinitely?”

I caught the imploration in his voice.

He turned his head but avoided looking straight at me, his muscles stone cold, frigid.

“Things are never better than what they're made of, what they foster inside them” he added.

“Should I take this personally?” I prompted my mind jumping to the lonely conclusion instantly.

“There's no validation in your trying to define yourself all the time. I know the idea that beings are a cluster of walking words is very tempting. Believe me, it isn't satisfactory either”

“What do you suggest I do then? Just give up? You define yourself as well” I jabbed hinting at calling himself Sin.

Raising his head the gloom danced off his colourless hair. I wondered if staring at the black of the sky had anything to do with the colour of his eyes, whether the opaque dark had somehow melted into his pupils pouring the stuff it contained into them as well.

“Giving up has a certain ring to it, don't you think? Worrying about defining yourself is a waste of time. Others will do the job. Lean back and let them. Don't corrupt their definitions with your own labels. They're horribly derailed and inappropriate anyway”

He mouthed 'selfish' at the yawning heavens.

I followed his gaze up, up, up and hoped my eyes would capture the celestial material the above was woven of.

“Are they going to fade away?” I asked my heart sinking. Pretending the pain went on a vacation didn't really send it away.

“It depends on your choice”

“My choice of what?”

“Well the bruise you let heal will disappear; the one you open then reopen when it begins to scab will likely leave a mark. The choice is yours. The question you have to ask yourself is whether you have the strength to stab yourself in the heart every single day”

I sighed feeling my chest knot itself using a slow, squeezing twist.

“No” I said “there's no question there. What I have to consider is whether I have the willingness to pull the knife out each time”

I watched a dot flicker then fizzle out. We were embraced by falling, fiery corpses. The night was a morbid beast.

“Is that why you chose me? Because I think I'm empty?”

Taking his time he didn't respond until I gave up anticipating his reply.

“Why does it matter?” sounded the disappointingly unsatisfactory answer.

“I don't suppose someone like you would do that out of the goodness of their heart” I quipped. I saw a muscle tense in his jaw. When he looked at me I saw raw disappointment on his face.

“You want to hear that you're special, don't you? That I chose you after stalking you for weeks, after I gathered enough proof of your exceptional skills or cruelty or intelligence or 'insert something flattering'. That I knew about your helpless situation; that I felt pity and the instant urge to become the angel of holy assistance and rescue you from your inevitable fate rolling towards you. Who would you rather colour me to be; the rescuer, the prince or the murderer? You'd like me to sing odes to you about your bravery and inventiveness and moan over your loss because poor you, you lost mummy and daddy and have to raise little blondie. All. On. Your. Own. You're broke, on top of that an adolescent which enables you to experience every little nuance of your existence as a greater-than-life crisis. There. You heard it.”

“I didn't— didn't want to hear—”I stuttered at his harshness. He wasn't loud or shouting, his words were cool, calculated jabs of a blade.

“You wanted to hear lies. You still long for their comfort. Yet you see, death is the truth to all the lies of life” he nodded at me“ That silence in your chest diminishes all the false noise out there so you can focus on the one that is real” he paused so his words had time to be registered and decoded “What does it matter why?”

“I have to know” was the only thing I extruded.

For another moment we listened to a car roam past us. An eternity away he answered.

“It is because you're selfish”

He was right. I had to hear the lies. All the lies. I was still devoted to their convenience. My ache had to be dulled. And it was ridiculous that in the midst of the howling wind I still needed to know the summer breeze was mixed in the gale.

“So it's not even to get a kick out of it?” I asked, because when there was nothing to say you had to come up with something stupid.

“It is” he declared “I guess when you've lived long enough the whole concept of fun re-evaluates itself”

He stood up and I found myself face-first with his palm for the second-time that night.

I stared at the pale, slender fingers so long that my indecisiveness was evident, my questions hanging in the air, unspoken but palpable. For guidance I glanced up, at his profile outlined by the confetti of the city lights and the sporadic, miscellaneous constellations.

He took in the horizon with an unblinking steady look before his eyes glazed over and returned to the inner gazing from the excursion outside.

“Are you familiar with the works of Oscar Wilde?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Do you know what his opinion was of dreamers?”

That they are the cursed prophets of the night punished for their foresight at the break of the day.

I nodded.

“We're going dreaming, then”

There was another thing Oscar Wilde said; when wishing for dreams to come true we became voluntary amnesiacs in the face of our nightmares.

The path he intended to lead me down was indeed a nightmarish one. Paved with blood.

Shivering, I heard my bones clatter against each other. My whole being shook violently. My insides screamed with a high wail, my blood hummed with a low, tempting call as I listened to the pattern of the beat, the rhythm painted in the air. Ice against fire. A yes that meant no, a no that nodded yes. Lives hung from a single letter.

“He is coming home at 11”he said, prepping me when we climbed up the smooth planes of the brick wall perfectly perpendicular to the ground resting 15 feet below.

My stomach churned and I was disgusted with myself for the first time. I hoped, wished, prayed for a blackout, the sweetness of the grey fog of unconsciousness.

“Why him?” Was the question I chose from the many circulating in my spinning skull.

Nerves, muscles, sinews popped, probing their strength, wiggling, bulging like snakes under my skin ready to pounce.

“Why not?” he shot back gently “Would you like me to lay out some more lies on a silver tray so you'd more easily stomach it?”

Swallowing I shook my head, the lump in my throat didn't budge.

“I was only curious” I trembled out.

A flutter of his eyes.

“You cannot be squeamish now” he advised “It shouldn't make a difference if he's a widower, a father of three who works hard or a pedophile multimillionaire narcissist. Most importantly you don't care. You need their blood, blood ties them together, the rest is just an appendage, a baggage that is not your responsibility to unpack" his voice was final.

It mattered. How could it not? Even if I made a hypocrite of myself.

He anticipated my counter-religion.

“Remember what I said about fun”

That was all the persuading he'd done.

Then my senses heightened, I sweated through my shirt, I wasn't sure I blinked in the last hour at all, as I stood above the crumple of human drifting off to better waters.

The air was cool, my hair curled at the back of my neck, heartbeat rumbled between the walls, echoing in the concrete cube of a space. I heard the rush of blood, the pounding of the muscle as it pushed and pushed the liquid that rivered through his body to the smallest particle of the perfect system. The breath he took, grazing his throat nuzzling his way down to the lungs to fill them. Strange how we were just a jumble of bags and pipes and splinters working as a delicately calibrated mechanism. If we thought of how close the end lingered at all times life would've been named a macabre dance not life.

I was a statuesque mix of stark controversies as I stood still the looming doom over this unsuspecting system of organic clogs.

“Don't look into the eyes” his voice so low a whisper it sounded like a thought.

I obeyed.

Him and the call. The razor letters slashing my veins into tinsels I lunged as my muscles ignited. Squelch of skin and bone, hard and soft, the frenzied rush of adrenaline and blood as they flowed, ran past you, above you and you pulsated with the last breath, you hammered the final rhythm and evanesced with them.

I was aware of the wiggling, of the struggle of the forest of limbs flailing, the battle of the heart, of the breath, the ultimate flicker of hope dying down; the very last stand of the flesh. The desperate howls of death against the canvas of the noise of cicadas would chase me until I crawled for mercy. Simple. The flexes relax, the upholstered drop, the upright droop. Life is a strain and death is a stretch.

And I knelt in an ocean of blood, my mouth wet, scarlet dripping down my chin, never thinking what I had done. It was never-possible. I let the crimson waves wash away my eyes so I didn't have to see, so I could submerge and revel.

We left the room, a flaming red mark of our actions, the blankets twisted into a fabric rose, stanched by a breathless sheath of life, cloaked in a sum of murky ghosts validating our sin.

We strolled the middle of the road, teasing the early morning cars—none dared to holler at the lithe boy and the girl dipped in blood.

“This is why” he said.

I raised an eyebrow. The fading orange lights shone down on us, unbothered by the absence of our shadows.

“The reason I chose you”

“So you did stalk me” So he did see the emptiness.

“Yes” he hid his long fingers in his pockets “ and that is all the apology you'll ever get from me”

“I'll try to keep it in mind” I mumbled.

“Do you know what happens now?”

I could guess but I shook my head.

“You will disappear”

I opened my mouth in protest but he shut me up.

“Not from her” he assured me in a flat voice “From yourself”

“That has already happened”

“You say this because it hasn't. You don't yet understand” his voice rang with a forlorn ache “It is a conscious madness. Your soul will be eaten away and there's no cure for that. And you won't have me. I couldn't prepare you for the slow blooming of insanity. This was all I'm empowered to do”

The final note in his voice clenched my stomach.

“Is this the help you meant?” my voice a whiplash booming in the sleepy desolation of the morning.

We both stopped, him a few steps further ahead. Incongruous with his pallid washed-out colours, the shades of the scene seeped into the black and white tainting it with rust and ink. The wind blew gently at the loose cloak of loneliness that hung about him. It became him.

“It's all I can do for you” he wasn't palliating, it was a statement, a shrug.

“This isn't what I asked for!” I shouted my voice pitching high.

“Isn't it?”

I ignored him.

“How is this help? I can't even help myself. I'll go crazy and I won't be able to take care of myself not to mention her. I wanted to save my sister...how—how can I do that when I can't help myself? Why did you do this to me?”

I was screaming.

“Is there any answer that would pacify you?”

The pounding rage in my ears made me lunge at him. I grabbed him by his soft shirt, fingers interlocking with the fabric. The fall was so fast time slowed almost into a still.

Before I heard the satisfactory crunch of his bones clattering on concrete I felt the impact shatter my every vertebrae. For a protracted second whiteness blinded me.

His eyes bore into mine, pinned me to the damp asphalt.

Growling, hissing I screamed, straining against him to no avail.

Pain shot, branched through my back as he slammed my head one, two, three times at the ground, leaving me with a stunned gasping silence.

“This is past” he said, squeezing my wrists making a point “This” his grip loosened gradually “is what is now”

After an awkward moment filled with the electric hum of the wires webbing above I laughed one of those hysterical cackles that rang the bell at the end, when someone ran out of sanity, when the right side of the mind detached from the wrong.

“It's a bloody metaphor. A bloody metaphor...”

Oh, he was right. I had been a hapless mess until he showed up. Then I was just a mess. Transformed I was able, equipped with all the tools I would need, cruelty, strength, hunger. Lethal, relentless, incalculable.

“This is what now is, Mallory” he said casually holding my skin plaited in his.

“What is it worth? You are tired of nows”

His face went lightless.

“Be honest now. What would you have found out if this didn't come along?”

“I wasn't completely hopeless”

“Liar” he leaned in “Doesn't mean you didn't feel like drowning on air”

Staring at the stars form the deepest of wells—my home for the week.

“Life isn't a road you tread in company” he murmured and I saw the proof of that in his eyes” Death isn't a group activity either. You must see how they're defined by each other. Just like what you can do draws the line between what you can't do. Is this really not what you had asked for?“

“I never asked to become a monster”

He chuckled.

“I know of crimes worse than ample killing”

Releasing me he rolled off me and spread out his long limbs on the ground next to me.

“Are there many of me?” I asked my chest lifting with featherlightness.

“You should shirk from seeking them”

“I have no means to track anyone down. I can't abandon my…responsibilities. Remember?”

“In that case, the burden is shared. It doesn't matter to how many parts it's divided. Unfortunately it doesn't diminish its weight”

“She'll resent me one day” I thought out loud.

“You won't care by then”

“Right” I snorted“ because I would abhor myself by then more than she could ever hate me”

“You will at least feel something” a distant longing mixed into his voice, he turned his face toward mine“ one of those stupid things you take for granted. When you're nothing it is hard to possess such intensely human traits. You kind of envy them. People have a whole palette while you have one colour. It gets boring”

“What is your name?”

He remained silent.

“You're leaving” I reasoned “ If I can't go after the others I can't pursue you either”

“What does it matter then?”

“It doesn't. It's just one of those sort of things I like to know. And remember”

“You already know who I am”

“That's not your name”

For a moment I knew he was going to tell me. For a moment he considered that too, believed the same. Maybe no one actually knew, none alive so he would've seen me fit to hold such a secret.

“I don't like names. They allow for possession. I don't like the confines of a single word to refer to everything I am. After all what could a single word know, let alone know about me?”

I was at a loss for words. Words were at loss of describing the turmoil of my aching heart, the voracious loss that chewed at my chest or the roiling churn that took my name added to and reduced it. Using my face, pain disguised itself playing dress up in my skin. Nothing was left but a bodiless mask floating in the air.

“I'm going to have to leave her” a grimace of fate “Right? It all is backwards. I'm saving her by becoming a danger. I'm not abandoning her by leaving. It's all a joke“

“There is less pain in living for the moment. Especially when you have nothing but an endless row of nows”

“It isn't really working out for you so that cannot be your philosophy”

“One chooses philosophies by what they see as truth. Which has little to do with whether you take them and live by them”

“What's your truth then?”

“Things are only happy when you see the end of them”

I smiled a bitter smile.

“Where do you go when you can't bear it anymore?”

“Either the highest or the lowest. I find when you search the peaks you discover life anew”

“Why don't you try and seek the others?”

“Because they must understand what it's like? It would be easy, yes. But do I have the right to corrupt their lives further?”

“They probably have questions” I suggested. I had tons.

“What they couldn't answer themselves should remain unanswered. Dwelling on the unsolvable is highly unwise. It wasn't a fair exchange that I have destined you all to a life of solitude and restless ache especially that I have first-hand experience of the following ordeals”

It was my time to scoff.

“How's that different from what my parents had destined me to live? How's that different from this one?”

He regarded me for a long moment.

“I wish you weren't like this. It would be easier for you”

“Like what?”

“Intelligent. It's a deal lot harder to stay sane when you're trying to find logic where there's none. It's a deal lot harder when there's a sanity you can lose”he said“ If there's one thing I'd want you to conceive coming from me it's this. Don't try to rationalize. Please. It is the fastest, easiest and most ruthless way to go mad”

We both fell silent. My inaudible promise locked in the night settled over our empty chests.

We waited for the sole streak of light to broaden, approach with the tumbling unsure steps of a toddler. Dawn was a peculiar animal, so tentative, so polite in its inevitable cruelty. Deploying you with the hope of not coming, convincing you of the uncertainty of its way when the deceitful truth we all knew was advancing.

When the blood-red rust of daybreak sat only an inch away from the tip of his ashen hair he reached out to draw invisible lines on my face. He traced all the little imperceptible lacerations. He knew about where they mapped my skin better than anyone.

With a lopsided grin he told me how ironic it was that we would never get to see our reflection, that physically we were protected from facing ourselves.

Looking into his eyes and what they conveyed I understood the importance of that. He told me if he had seen himself he wouldn't know whether he could carry on. He imagined all the lost screaming from the dark of his eyes. That the picture of madness reflected could make you truly manic, that facing it would make him want to do the unspeakable. I promised to remember my irony. My little cracks that will keep me together once the abyss consumed all that mattered and all that didn't. It was a pronounced vow.

Then he went. Went in many ways. I've long forgotten which was the truth. Each of them or none.