Shiny Things

(Note: The changes in tense and elongated sentences are a deliberate, stylistic choice by the author.)

You see the shiny thing, once heart-shaped and meaningful and worn by someone alive. At some point you would have considered the who and the what and the why, but giving a fuck is a luxury that has long-passed and the last thing you need is to indulge in nostalgia. You know that there will be more shiny things that will catch the dead world’s light and you know how little they all mean now.

Sometime later you find yourself walking across a place that used to be somewhere and your mind wanders towards her, cranked-up and spun-out in that little bar on that little street in that little town that you once both called home. You remember how you both caught eyes across the room and how she straddled the stool beside you and how you flung yourself into a conversation that you knew was never about the things being said. At some point the noise would fall away and the crowd would become stragglers and you both would take your leave, stumbling through the night in a teenage-runaway stupor. The next few days you would snort bathtub cook and laugh and fuck while fighting about nothing, oblivious to the world being torn apart outside as you both burned yourselves alive from the inside.

You remember where you were when it all started and how the slow changes became quick and how surreal it felt when everything fell apart. You remember her, clutching tightly as you both drank cheap vodka and even-cheaper whiskey to replace one type of shake for another while you both watched the fires appear over the earth’s edge. You remember how loud death is and how quiet the world becomes after you kill a man and how ashes can still be lit aflame. You remember her laughing and crying, often at the same time.

The hours would become days that turned into weeks and months and you both would find the earth’s edge over and over as every place became the same. You both would find the ways to make things better as everything got worse, living in the memory of the people you once were and finding solace in how little those mistakes mattered now. You would watch yourself become unmoored from the world and her and finally yourself, washing away into a vast ocean of something that you have never been able to name. You would realize that you would spend the rest of your life paddling against that undertow.

At some point the new became old and the horrifying became tedious and you found her, glass-eyed and pale lying in that bathtub in that little abandoned house you now call home. You buried her beside a tree after wiping away the blood from her wrist, leaving a pile of rocks as a shrine that only you would recognize. For weeks you would do everything to forget while visiting her daily, hysterical like a circus clown without an audience, performing under a ceaseless sky that was now your prison. Eventually you understood that she was right and you were wrong and the only way to shake away the devil is to meet him halfway. The last time you saw the rocks and the tree and her you could do nothing but smile, knowing that you would never see any of them again.

You leave the shiny thing where it lays, bright and twinkling and radiant in a place between somewhere and nowhere. Years later, on a day like today or tomorrow or yesterday, another man will find the misshapen heart and smile as the world’s end approaches.