The sun is easy on his skin as he rolls over in bed. It creeps in through the blinds and touches his lashes, plays with his hair. The girl in his arms opens her eyes; she looks at him, carefully unraveling herself from his arms, trying not to wake him. She gets out of bed and goes to the window, and when she looks at the sky she knows that this is their last day together. She opens the window and breathes in the chilly morning air fresh from the scent of cherry blossoms. A dove sits on the tree under the window, but it is alone, looking around the big world. The girl turns around and goes to the bathroom, gets ready. She puts on concealer, mascara and lipstick. Her makeup is rushed, cakey but she doesn’t care. There is no time to waste. When she returns to the room the boy is sitting up and when she looks into his eyes she can see that the glow from them is gone. She looks around; the flowers from the table, the books by the bed disappeared as well. The room seems rather empty now.
‘I didn’t know it would happen so fast’ he says, his voice raspy and her stomach drops; the southern accent from his voice is fading.
‘It’s okay’ she feels dumb saying this. It is not okay. She lays down in the bed next to him and pulls his head on her chest. ‘Listen to my heartbeat’ she whispers and wonders if he still hears something, or if it's just an empty echo in her fading body. ‘Breathe with me’ they take a deep breath together and when the girl opens her eyes the cherry tree is gone.
‘Don’t think about it’ the boy says, catching her gaze. ‘I want to be with you fully’
They fall into a shallow sleep sweetened by the scent of the girl’s perfume. The day goes by, and with every breath the boy takes small pieces of his reality disappear. They spend the day in bed, they only go out to gather food and water. They eat fruits and talk and sleep again, and the house is slowly fading away, the small garden darkens until everything is dark so that they can’t tell if the night has set or if there is nothingness beyond the light of the small lamp beside the bed. The girl looks around and the abyss creeps closer.
‘Why did you do it?’ she asks.
‘I didn’t know the price I would pay’ says the boy. ‘We all want to go to heaven, after all’
The girl wants to say something hurtful, that she will never get to go to heaven. But she doesn’t because the boy’s eyes are filled with tears.
‘Why did you stay?’ the boy asks. ‘You had a choice, you could’ve been free.’
The girl thinks for a while. There is no sound anymore; only the boy’s voice and slow heartbeat, breaking through nothingness.
‘I didn’t want to. I would rather disappear loving you than not love you at all.’
The boy thinks.
‘You wouldn’t remember me. When I go to heaven I won’t remember you.’
‘I wouldn’t choose not to remember you. I still want to have something of you, even if it’s pain.’
For a while they are in silence and when the light of the night lamp dies the girl reaches for the boy’s hands.
‘Do you remember the day we spent in the beach house?’ she asks, her voice a mere shadow. ‘Tell me you remember’ she says, her voice filled with tears.
But the boy doesn’t remember. The walls of his reality slowly crumble beneath the weight of the decision he has made.
‘I love you’ he says, reaching for the moment in which he still knows the meaning of the word.
‘I love you too’ the girl whispers, and she thinks of the abyss that is creeping closer. She thinks of the boy in heaven, with so many possibilities, so much to do. And finally she thinks of herself, and how she has nothing ahead of her. How she will fade away into her love, the love that erases her from this world.
And suddenly the boy’s hands are empty, and he is in darkness. He closes his eyes because he knows that he doesn’t need them anymore, and there is nothing, nothing at all around him. And centuries pass within a mere second and he wakes up, into the darkness, and he feels nothing, sees nothing, and he is nothing, after all he is above all notions of the world. The only part left of him is a tinted ache in his core that smells like cherry blossoms and sounds like a fading heartbeat.
About the Creator
sagar dhital
I'm a creative writer in the way that I write. I hold the pen in this unique and creative way you've never seen. The content which I write... well, it's still to be determined if that's any good.
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Dancing after death
The graveyard around St Peter and St Paul church in the sleepy Kentish hamlet of Charing, a ‘Blink and you will miss it’, village on the main road which runs in a shallow valley of the Kentish Weald, is notable for the large number of children’s graves, each marked by a tiny headstone, and which are mostly unmarked with a name or date. There are over one hundred and thirty, almost all dating from about the same period in history. Most folk miss this interesting place, as Charing is a village which boasts a high street of buildings dating back seven hundred years or more, a Palace, once the home of archbishops from nearby Canterbury, the large meadow named Clewards which was once the site of the fishing lakes for the Palace, and the now hidden but still extant ice well. Clewards meadow tumbles it’s erratic way from the market place, down across the past lake beds to a spring of fresh water, which in the time that King Henry stopped here for a few days at the Palace, back in 1420, and on his way to ‘The Field of the Cloth of Gold’ in France, fed what was then a large moat, a protection for both the palace and the village too. A triangle of trees and grass, outside of the two rustic cottages here, marks the place where once stood the village stocks and gallows, on the old road to Ashford, the market town just six miles away. The gallows long gone, this area still has the remnants of sadness hanging over it. The church, built around nine hundred years ago, in the time which I have known it, has lost some of its detail around the arch of the fine porch and doorway, to the effects of the twentieth century and acid rain, but the interior is much as it has always looked, though these days a congregation can be counted on the fingers of one’s hand, and for most of the time it is left open, cared for but deserted by humans, the odd bat fluttering about at dusk, the mice beneath the pews, and black crows squawking at the break of day, being the only noise apart from the rumble of traffic from the motorway just across the hill. So Charing is a slow dreary place these days, - no longer is there a bustling market by Royal charter in Market place, but for those in the know, Charing still has some fascinating secrets, and ghostly happenings, though only the older residents can nowadays still recall or tell the tales. As the first of May approaches, yes, May Day, it brings to mind a strange occurrence which, still to this day fascinates those who live in the centre of the village, and which is known in the hamlet as the ‘Night of the Dancing Feet’.
By sagar dhitalabout a month ago in Education
Once More Unto The Breach
He let the sword slip through his other gauntleted hand. Athlistan stood atop the crest of the rubble of Bordanium’s ruptured curtain wall. Beyond, the remnants of the Saxon’s first assault regrouped. They would come again–Athlistan knew it.
By Matthew Fromm7 days ago in Fiction
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