achromatic

a world without color

There's something itchy in my brain, but I can't reach it. I don't think I can; at least not how I used to. When I was there, back then, with her...with them. Well, we were together and that was about all I could say about it. It's not like it was anything special, really. We were together and we were who we were and we lived, both freely and enraptured by the ever-approaching circumstances of life. And that was the thing that made me really feel like there was something worth being for, like I had a purpose and a rhythm and a rhyme and that every time I looked out, every beat of my heart, every momentary glance and shiver of scripture no voice could hold--a hand on another, a stroking finger, a grin from the side that grew into a smile, the creases in her eyes, in their eyes, in the silent moments that could and would never be recorded--I had seen them ten million times and yet I still yearned to see them again, agonizing for their presence like an uprooted sycamore.

I move like a corpse--rather, like a machine. To call myself a corpse is a slight to the dead, for I still breathe and piss and sleep and eat. But that is all. It doesn't bring any sense of joy, no essence of wonder or even the acknowledgement of its absence--just the sickly withering pain of waking up yet again; of being forced to see the life we once shared in achromatic finality. Without her--without them--the lackluster role of my continuity wavers like pantone swatches, each discarded and left to flutter upon walls that once held such hope for some new hue--to change the mood of this dark, colorless place. The only hope left is that which is within me, that I might see them again, if only in dreams--if only in my own eternal sleep. For now I sit in ever-compressing silence, staring at the silhouettes of what they would have become, what they already had been, what they would never have the chance to be.

I count the silence in rain drops--drip, drip--thunder rolls through my skull and time spreads itself across the hollow walls, shudders and steps through my beating heart as it mechanically pushes cold blood through my crumbling frame--the sound bounces around me and through me and off of me, yet like a grounded bell--I have lost the option to resonate. I am an echo; the last strand of memory that remains of they--of we--and I count my loss in solitude. Even if I were to bleed, the pigmentation would blanch against the tepid shell of our hearth--no crackle, no warmth. They have their apotheosis--ill-timed, entire--and I have the synagogue it left, anemic and unlit, cooling to the temperature of the room and keeping it.

;_;