Page 123 - NyghtVision Magazine Volume 3 #3

“My precious love,” beneath the torrent of sadness falling outside my window, danced my fingers
across the face of my laptop. Driven. Possessed. Anguished. I paused, wishing I could cry. Wishing
that beneath the last whisper of the rayn I could lay down my life.

“Long now the shadows of the evening,” continued the anguish that now possessed my body, “and
alone and tired, My thoughts are only of you. T’is true I know that there is in that nothing new.
Despite all these years, you are always first upon My mind when I awaken and last when to sleep
I am given. This longing which I carry deeply in My heart lessens not.......” Desperate. Haunted.
Words coming faster now as the shrill sadness of the rayn seemed everywhere and in the silence

around me danced its melancholy...........

And then it rayned. Still falls the rayn.

Mark turned to his left and leaned his shoulders against the wall, folded his arms and straightened
his back. The dance of our conversations has not been lost to me. He is about to get serious. Very
serious.......... The deep, roasted breath of Colombian coffee settled over the space between us and
for a moment I thought about bringing my cup to my lips. I wound my fingers around the edges of
the cup, still warm and comforting, holding it tightly, waiting for the moment when I could bring
it to my lips without seeming to disregard Mark’s seriousness, but Mark looked over the edge of
his glasses and looked slightly down at me. I didn’t dare move.

My eyes, hidden in the darkness of my glasses, looked past Mark, through the space between us
and the glass wall of the coffee shop, to the veil of tears that descended voicelessly upon the world
beyond.

As much as I cherish these conversations, I dread them. Whether or not he knows it, Mark has a
way of reaching deep within me until the pain buried so deeply that I pray it cannot touch me ever
again rayns down around me. I can’t flee. I can’t escape. It’s there. So nakedly obvious that even
in my blindness I cannot say I cannot see it. I can’t turn away from it. As though my hands are
handcuffed behind me and my face forced to look straight ahead, I can do nothing save look at it.
Look at it. Dead on. Face to face. Eye to eye. In that moment, that moment when the pain flees its
sepulcher, the sepulcher where I have entombed it in the pretense of forever, the dank chill of its
ruthlessness burns through me. Unable to cry, unable to die, upon the cross of all I have suffered,
upon the cross of every tear I have never been able to cry, I am left to hang.

And when the conversation ends, I am left alone to suffer the truth of it all.

“Let’s face it,” Mark said. His words fell around me, but I wasn’t there to hear them. I was outside.

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