southstar
"So despite all that bullshit, I'm still here, aren't I? I'm still on this bus with you and we're still going to some fucking hick town up in New England. I'm still letting you take your ugly artsy pictures of me when I'm staring off into space and I'm still sharing a bed with you tonight and listening to your heartbeat and the rain and the wind while we fall asleep together like pathetic adorable losers. Despite all that I'm still here with you."
He'd forgotten what humanity was like. What it was like to coexist with others. What it was like to live among those not of rot and leprosy. Among the carcasses of the undead, he laughed, and laughed, losing his mind with every fly to flit past and every deep, wheezing breath of putrid air.
We looked each other over under the flickering, cheap fluorescent light, trying to decide what we felt. If we hated each other or ourselves. If we hated everything around us or everything within us. We settled on silence and receded, lingering in shadow on the outskirts of the reaches of the light.
I was good at them. Especially throwing. If you gave me a shot or a disc, I'd send it flying out into the field with a cocky grin on my face and the wind trying its damnedest to make me lose my footing but I wouldn't. I'd just cock an eyebrow and look down and point out how my disc made indentations in the mud at laugh at the wobbling path it carved through the air.
It was the horses I loved, but it was more. It wasn't the animals alone. It was the sense of freedom. It was the fact that you could ride for what felt like forever and keep on going and going and feel the wind and hear the birds and not worry about going home, at least for a little while, at least until your teacher called you back.
The staccato of the timpani and the mournful strings accompanied him through the concerto, each leg of the stanza, each phrase, separated minutely, but forming a rich tapestry woven by a master craftsman.
We had no idea where we were going. We'd lost our map a few miles back, and every landmark looked the same. The road was empty and the only things in the sky were the stars and moon, with no sign of civilized lifeforms for what felt like an eternal distance. We were en route to absolutely nowhere and we had never been happier.
It was among the must of old books and the silence of students that they found each other, hunching behind the towering bookshelves, whispering secrets over tomes of poetry and finding romance in the subtle rustling of turning pages.
It seems like we've met before, and I don't know where. Do you? Do you remember the time before we were torn into halves and cast in opposing directions and set to search, desperate, for the missing pieces in between? I don't recall, and this empty, sinking void within my memory is troubling.