cracks

not poetry x

He’s always been able to picture what it would be like. Perhaps that’s why it hurts so much, when his room is dark and his phone has fallen silent. When he slips through the cracks in his imagination and sees what everything could be if they had given it a shot. Yet there’s something wrong about the shadows he sees on his walls, twisting into recognizable shapes. Carrying him far away from all the missed opportunities and instead bringing him to a place where the tea is boiled and the eggs are crackling bronze and the wooden floor creaks under his feet.

This is where blue eyes are more vibrant than anything he has ever seen, and hair is spun of gold that lingers in the corner of your mind even after you’ve looked away. This is the place he escapes to when the voices screech at him or worse, when they fall silent, and this is where he flees when the demons crawling under his fingertips refuse to pull away and instead have him type out unanswered message after message.

He can picture it so well, can close his eyes and be so close to his own salvation it’s like reaching out for the sun. He can feel the burn on his skin, but the closer he gets the more he realizes it’s too far away, impossible to reach and capture. He’s always loved fireflies as a child, he guesses he’s never really changed after all in that aspect.

They’d live in a house away from the city, on a hill where the grass would never stop being green and the sky would never turn grey and no water colour paint would bring it quite to life. But he’d try, he’d try. There’d be a willow where he would sit and try to put it all on paper but he’d always end up wandering, distracted.

They’d forget to buy a doormat and drag dirt into the house and across the creaking floors, but no one would come to visit and secretly neither of them would mind the tracks. Instead they’d pretend the trails were breadcrumbs and find their way back to each other easily the moment they’d forget about the other’s presence.

Some days they wouldn’t get out of bed, talk intimately under white sheets that’d leak sunlight all over their skin and illuminate their eyes like fluorescent fairy lights. They’d whisper to each other, because there’d be no reason to raise their voices when it’d be just them and the hidden away demons under their bed. They’d fall in love all over again. It would be like rising up from their bones and letting everything else fade to dust, water soaking into grass, that’s how easy it would be. And in-between sneaking kisses and hoarse laughter, there’d be the growing dark and the growling stomachs, but none of them would notice because the only light they’d see would come from the other’s eyes, and the only hunger they’d feel would be for the other’s lips.

He can picture it so well, gets lost in that world longer and longer, slips away quietly. They notice of course, reach out the one time he resurfaces and distinguishes the real and the fake shadows on his wall and ceiling, but their hands go right through him. They say there are five stages of grief, hold him close and tell him it’s okay to go through them and take his time. But there aren’t any stages to this pain and there aren’t any stages to go through before death’s fingers unlatch their tight grip on his head and his heart.

Because it was never meant to be, he knows, from the start they were destined to be close yet too far away to reach and capture. There is no bargaining, there is no acceptance, because when it comes to this bone-wrenching ache of having come close to something he hadn’t been allowed to have in the first place, there is no start or finish. There just is.

And so maybe, in the end,  the worst thing about it all, is how close they got to having everything and nothing at all.