An Inhuman Condition

His bright face fell, fading to a partial frown. The weight of unspoken sentiment dragged his cheeks from their elated pedestals – pillars on which they stood drugged from the nostalgic encounter. As they sat silent, his mind flipped through the scrapbook of their moments and memories only to find the numerous hurt personified in its final pages. This slow dissent into the past’s faded pictures staggered his thoughts with its thunderous conclusion. This gradual forward reminiscence and his merry mood guised the facts, blurred the content of the thing so much that his surroundings were uncomfortable and alien when he abruptly awoke. He was akin to a boiling shellfish slowly simmering to the final choke of its death concealed behind a comforting curtain. The thing had become real again too quickly and too fully for him to brace against the fall; he was stripped bare amongst his own thoughts and once again vulnerable to their venom.

It hadn’t been long since he first visited that place – the sullen surroundings still seemed familiar and fresh. But it was different then – less sudden. The pain eased in until it slowly whittled him down to a splinter. His hours spent in bed gradually grew longer until he couldn’t wake at all – often spending the day drearily sulking there. The long days turned to endless weeks like a record playing at a slower setting until the wave receded and he began to cope. He had fought valiantly against it – beaten it back inch by inch – until he was able to function as more than a mere fraction of his former self. Even once he began to leave home again, the awful feelings stayed with him, but he managed to mitigate their sway. He went weeks without comfort – without so much as glancing at attractive women because they reminded him of her. He couldn’t masturbate without thinking of her sweet scent or soft touch, and so he denied his impulses. She was everything that brought him pleasure, and without her, he could only feel the opposite. He was Milton’s antagonist cast out, bitter and seething.

His drunken bliss and smile were wholly her doing, and their departure embittered him with a new sadness. He felt like the unwitting prey of some subtle trap obscured by the subterfuge of a siren’s song. His sinking visage was nearly tearing once he was cognizant of his surroundings. He had snapped out of a shattered past into the cracked and over-worn present. She was his curse – a wonderful and dear thing locked deep within a venerated ventricle of his heart, pumping her influence throughout, pulling pain behind it atop a baleful barge.

What had seemed so sweetly innocent, so innocuous, seconds before had now turned on them both. There was a gruesome collision on memory lane with nostalgia causing the casualties. The last thing either of them needed was to stroll through their sentimental moments. Any foresight from the present parties would have seen the crash, that unspoken thing whose nature afforded them this merry pretense, coldly crossing their path ahead. Now it was done; torn open upon their shoulders chilling them with its weight. The glassy quiet froze around their remembered remorse and twisted its gritty shards through their throats leaving only longer silence.

When she finally spoke, her timid whispers filled with meek allusions of regret. With every word she uttered, he winced at the sound of each syllable. Her sentiment snuck through its painstakingly placating tone, and his searing seething withered into a sullen sadness like a weight being lifted from his body leaving broken bones behind. The cliché, it-wasn’t-you speech coupled with a heavy helping of her remember-the-good-times tone drained and deflated his hurt until he was too emotionally exhausted to continue.

He watched mute – studying her leeching lips and longing for one last, pitiful press against their lascivious pores. The words murmured past like an uninspiring performance in a forgetful play, but he was stuck subjugated to their sway. With every brief pause, she searched his face for some suggestion that he might have something to say, but there was no revealing reprieve to find. She continued recanting words long gone and all the thorny things said ad infinitum as if they would both perish in a quiet past, but he was long lost inside the labyrinth of her eyes, basking deep within those luminous beacons like a moth batting against a bright bulb.

He was catatonic against her.