The Soulless Season

Warm words, once fragrant and sweet... now have turned hollow and frostbitten. Beautiful blooms now grown over with thistles and thorns. Trying to speak my heart was painful. I had known her for as long as I kept track of time and now my mindless minutes are spent trying to escape her scent. My chest fills heavy with a toxic mixture of anger and remorse blended ever so softly with sadness as I trudge farther away without looking back..

The effort to remain in some sort of tangible communication began to get ever more difficult as the days slipped away from us. The past seemingly cursed to repeat itself with decades worth of reliable evidence. Once a traitor, always meant to be it seems, regardless of intentions. Deep sadness comes to me easily when I drink. It's like a drug for me, not the wine, but the despair. It wraps around me in the beginning like a dream, and then slowly tightness, constricting my better judgement until all sense and solidarity spills out on to the floor.

This is the side of me she hates. The brutally honest, subjectively callous side. Willing to sell her out on a dime if it means conversing with a distant stranger, lamenting over woes and silent thoughts exposed of past misdeeds. Blowing rings of smoke across a gauzy frozen pond that used to be our field of wildflowers. Each toxic ripple curls as it wafts though the bone chilling brisk air. I listen in loud silence to the only sound out there, the echo of my desperate calls out to her. They return to me as lonely and as empty as they left.

Never to part, two halves to a whole we were destined to always to rise and fall together along with the Summer sun and the Harvest moon. To revel in her made me feel found. I felt seen in her eyes, heard finally above a whisper. I could only see being together until wind scattered our dust.

Now I can only see a shadow of her from across the glass mirror. The elixir of truth greases my tongue too loose, my head no longer securely affixed and I tell myself as my own deepest confidant, that it will not be long now till I am once again in her good graces and she'll return.

There is crispy cold biting silence as time passes. The ice stands up bravely to the winter blasts of the Soulless Season. Footsteps that used to dance no longer have direction. Dark sunken circles now overshadow the flat matte grey her glare now holds. I cannot escape it, I cannot run away from it because I am bound to it still.

Tired and Indignant, I slowly and careful walk further away hoping she will chase after me, realizing she needed me after all. My mind races at the different scenarios this distraction presents. A fleeting thought of freedom tingles in my fingers. What if I truly walked away this time wishing her well to seek out a life without me. I would then be free too to have independent thoughts and feelings, free from her rebuke. I shake it off as improbable, and almost unfathomable that there would be a me....without her.

What if she saw me leaving and wanted her emancipation, knowing if we stayed here, staring across the frozen pond our hearts would completely freeze over. Freedom would then be a gift, verses a curse. We would both survive, having only amputated one another in order to move on. My mind weighs the options. In her frailty without me, she might possibly fall through the ice that separates us. Then she would need me to help her once again like I used to before the ice divided us. Then we could once again walk together, return to real honest laughter in our search for Spring.

I know however, this too is yet another façade to mask my real fear of truly being abandoned. My presence, now only suffocates her. Wretched fumes of tainted good intentions and false recollections have penetrated deep. The stench of betrayal, is all that fills my nostrils as I inhale deeply...the sharp cold edges of reality cut me as choke back the tears of my own disillusionment that this season will thaw and we will see another bloom.

I walk gently halfway across, hearing the cracks beneath me with each step. Slowly I lay my resolve down flat and spread what is left of my dignity on to the frozen surface of truth. Staring up at the starless sky, I shed real tears of shame, knowing this time, she is truly lost to me. My breath becomes shallow as I try with all my remaining shreds of what was once golden, and innocent and pure - to desperately try once more to remember her scent.