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Mercy is something I am not entitled to. Both You and I are perfectly aware of that. In all consciousness, I have caused horror for reasons ambitious at most. Vain and conceited as I may be, not that I shame myself for it, not enough and not often at least, morality—plain, unforgiving, sneering—still lurks deep inside myself. It is only intelligent to predict a wrath blind to circumstance, blind to the fickle heart of a human, to strike upon me… Surely, incurring the likes of that is fair. I don’t fear damnation; it’s been looming all along. I take the blame as it all comes back to me. Shoot me down, break every last bone, flay me if that is what happens in Hell, if Hell even exists. Only…
Why did it have to be her?
I would have done… Everything.
Everything.
Even wearing scarlet corduroy, the chill had burrowed into my bones. Slightly shivering beneath the layers of leather I wore like a second skin, I found myself wandering past the open iron gates of the cemetery. With even those enormous French windows she had insisted upon in her—in our—flat, it was fruitless. To be there was to choke, as if chain-links were in my lungs. Her perfume on the vanity; Seduction with her necklace as a bookmark; her ancient wine and her cigarettes in the rightmost cabinet of the kitchen; her jacket hanging off my shoulders; lovebites blooming under her lips now withering in my skin; a cold bedsheet in which I am restless until I become faint. So, lest I, too, wither or shatter, I choose the open road.
I’m right where she left me. Rosary in tow, hands shoved into pockets, feeling more of the string than the bead, having watched love of mine leave. Amen.
It was intended to be a whisper, a breath that could become a vehicle, an angel if you will, and the earthworms and the seedlings perched upon her decaying body would translate my prayers. The delicate angels whose forms were as cloth would hoist my pleas over to her. That would be my absolution.
Yet, here I am, empty. Perhaps the wind refused to carry my voice. I would not blame her, no. Mayhaps it was my throat that had been stoned by absence. A sharp intake of the dawn’s jasper-licked dew, a crimson bead falling into my soaking palm, years of simpering over her bleeding away to bereaving. There I go again. Clutching at ridicule. Mocking myself just enough to remain on the stage rather than the cage. At this particular moment in time, I would let myself become one with the wall: a voice befalling hollow ears and soft brains. A blabbering thing to be ignored, taken with a heap of salt. Do not trust a man with perpetually bloodied eyes and quivering digits.
It is almost worthy of a scoff how unlike himself a man can become. The junkie of the previous year would be bewildered, even a touch petrified, at the corpse roaming now. Make no mistake, still roaming. He is always roaming. Not for hedonism, not to relish in the rushing gale, not for adolescent pleasures, not for the abject melancholia of an unimportant, lone being. There just is no place to land.
I’m lying. I think I lie to myself these days in a mere attempt to push back against the gravity of it all. Leaves crunch like fractures in a limb underneath trudging feet. My vision is so mangled. The sky is lapis lazuli, the robes of the Queen of Heaven. Instead of a red-hot blush even four years since meeting her, all that remain are midnights full of red eyes. I cannot let myself blink, or I will crash here and now. I am in motion.
I have nearly no cognizance of wherever it is that my feet are taking me, but there exists a sort of guiding light in my subconscious: an almost imperceptible luminescence that she had remembered to retain even as a lifeless body. I follow that gravitational guidance, unblinking, passing by rows and rows of headstones, head bowed.
Appears to me as I turn to the right, the miserable angel perched above the headstone christened Szerafina, and my heart absolutely screeches as soon as I begin to think of her. There ‘she’ is, freezing marble. Here she was, unending warmth, in my arms. It has been a week. The angel’s hair is stone, like its wings, its mineral tears from which soft sobs never spill, and the cleanly sculpted hand—unlike her ink-stained ones hovering over the headstone. Her headstone.
The propeller of my legs, motion foretold by memory, has ceased to spin. I begin to realise the cruel weight of the atmosphere, the prickling needles in my eyes ever since I swung my leg off my motorbike, the pistol lodged into my person beneath the corduroy. Acute lucidity accompanied by the trembling of my lower lip, the sting in my nose, the torrential downpour down my jaw.
One, three, five, all convening in a sea of nothingness.
Eleven. The eleventh.
Thirteen-th.
I grit my teeth to eat an ugly sob. I stumble forward. My hands are fists in my pockets. The rosary is but a thread of fate scissored off midway. I feel my knees become brittle and my heart biting its own ventricles. It is as if I am shackled with a string of metallic weights that extend from the core of the earth to this soil, to my boots, to my step. The wetness is certainly unwelcome, especially because it produces an unpleasant effect on my wrinkled scar.
I think I whimper. My lips open, air escapes, a miniscule sound is produced, and the wind rushes to carry it, carry it over to the ears of the weeping angel which would ring like mine do if they could but they cannot because, though I am flesh and bone and problem, that is a statue. Cold, hard, unfeeling stone. It is a cold day, I notice. No wonder. It’s January: the dead of winter.
She had once told me about this, voice so serene and mindful, about how outlandish the holiday of New Year’s was. Sprawled across the lovechair, a pout twisting her face, freezing fingers folded into mine, and it was silent except for the periodic snaps of my bar of chocolate. Gazing headlong at the snowflakes that died as soon as they kissed the railing of the balcony, she had perked up, and her silver tongue elaborated upon the Gregorian calendar's ties to industrialism. I could do nothing but listen to her ridicule all of humanity, and that was paradise. I think I could have even bursted.
What’s more ridiculous, my love, is that I am the exact creature you spoke of. Peeling my burnt skin until the blood coagulates to form a crude armour, crumbling instantly upon impact.
Thud.
Knees against the soil. Soil against my jeans. Palms digging into the rosary. Rosary crushed under the slick weight. Shoulders heaving. Heaving, under the weight. A pathetic attempt at a keen. I wrinkle my face even further as my hands slip out of my pockets, clutching the ground as if clutching her torso. I just want her back. For the love of everything, for Christ’s sake, for all the sins I’ve ever committed—You could have punished me anyhow, and I do not protest.
I would even become an ascetic, ensure that I do not taste any mirth for the rest of my days, understand that the most dignity I could be offered was sterile bread and vinegar for water, emptied my soul to be filled with nothing but the Word. Give her my soul, and let them take somebody else. Let her claw her way out of this soil.
Nothing but the perpetual repetition of please echoes in my mind. Witless at the end of the day, by now, my palms are pressed to my eyes, their heels digging in and the resultant dull ache almost welcome against the skull-snapping headache my sobs brought in. The crows of the dawn and I fill the gaps in the morning: squawking and sobbing. Laboured breaths and black wings gliding in the firmament and my hands fold together, interlaced fingers as if holding my rosary, and I whisper over her grave a single prayer.
If not in my arms, then in Christ’s arms would she find herself. Unallowed serendipity all her years, my heart can only call to a God I cannot defer to.
Resisting so minutely the urge to absolutely crumble and rest upon the ground she was under, I become somewhat of a broken record. She is imprinted behind my eyelids: her image flashing like a phantom, in all her piercing pulchritude, and each instant brings forth an uncalled for memory. Her, Lilith at a strip-club; existential exhaustion incarnate; ablaze all her life; a reckless rampage to be reckoned with, and I recognised and I relished every wrongness.
Heaven, help us.
I am barely holding it together, almost wailing as my elbows too thud to the ground. Face in arms, wet burnt skin pulled at, tears as if bubbling from the confines of my throat, a burning throat. It hit me again as I cracked open an eye. Another wave of it rushes in much like vomit, and I am a yet again puddle of poorly muffled pleases. Strength escapes me. Eventually, it is soil that greets my temple.
Stray hope lashes in my chest. These are its last breaths. The phantom of her embrace haunts me. Every occasion I have spent on my knees, I have also spent in her arms.