Rust

He sits, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers. The ash drips in smoky flourish; the air becomes an evanescent grey. The space between us is swallowed by the edacious depths of time: was it twenty minutes since we were here? An hour? Fifty heartbeats since we last kissed? My senses were a dead empire: grand, empty, a daedal of fibs. Something has achromatised between us. Spent from our physical appetite, we're no longer hungry for conversation.

'Are you angry with me?' He starts, an accidental Adonis still, disturbingly young, and heartbreakingly earnest. But there is something barren in him today―a palisade, a riot of distance. An equivocation; something that's in me too.

'Nothing to be angry about,' I reply, taking a long swallow, letting my gin administer its alcoholic anesthetic.

'Do you wish for things to be different?' He ventures, a question born out of curiousity, rather than want.

'I wish for different things,' I mutter; love in abstemious.

Is it relief that is stealing over his features? A gentle wash of regret? Or maybe it is nothing more than the fall of the sun, setting now with celerity. The muscular void in my heart remembers the ache for another. Memories whisper and scratch.

I let him take my hand, but intimacy is such a quandary over our mutual lovelessness. Another ending; one more paraplegic page in my story-space of silenced lovers.

'Gina Maria,' he says, smiling, but his eyes are far away now. Like the unripe angel, waiting for wings in a Michaelangelo's painting, but without the saintly light of devout desire. I return my Adonis to my dreamscape legends, to the myths of a transient everlast, where my own abstract failures can be made romantic and real in the eyes of another.

Love is a tyrant. And that's why I look to you―how foolish, I know―to palliate the excesses of its cruel regime.