She never knew that she could wish so deeply sometimes to forget the voice of a friend she had loved and lost. It seemed so wrong somehow, to want to erase those precious memories of him.
He had gripped her wrists and shaken her gently as he spoke the last words he'd ever actually speak to her, before kissing her on the cheek and walking away down that twilight street.
A kiss that she feels to this day, burning like a scar upon her skin.
She could not unthink his face, made slightly ghostly by the streetlights. Could not unthink his words, which have stayed with her all these years with the tenacity of a song she can not get out of her mind.
She has suffered an absence that caused this darkness in her heart. An absence of ... joy? ... hope? ... faith? ... justice?
The absence caused other things too, apparantly. Seeing someone on the street, a block away, feeling that she should be running after him. Seeing his letters again, last month, with the hopeful and understanding things he said, the chapters of the book he was writing. Recurring dreams....
In the dream, the rain doesn't so much fall as ... mist. It crouches like a predator, thick to knee level, laying across the street ... hiding some things, showing others and waiting, always feeling like waiting...
The dead man approaches her through the rain and the mystery with a grace he never displayed while alive. Compared to him, she is the one whose movements are ungainly and slow.
Because she is trapped in this flesh, she thinks. Because in this dreamworld, he is pure spirit, unfettered by gravity or body weight, while she still carrries the burden of life. Because he is free and she is not.
His features are expressionless as he glides to a stop a few feet in front of her and reaches out his hand. Empty... except for the need in his eyes.
And the sadness she can see reflected from her own.
Dec 27/2003