Chapter TwoI looked at you with great depth of longing but failed to grab you as you fell. This is the mistake that I shall be forever guilty of, the failure to save you from the clutches of the world. It will be sad to see you shrivel into something horrible through your concealed depression, your empty, hollow self; once small but brimming with wonder, now not even an eighth of what it used to be. After all, we used to hold hands, and you used to wear glasses, and we would roam around the fields of daisies and lilies, trying to chase butterflies as soon as they ceased contact with the petals. Those were fields of dreams, and those were the days where the world was bristling with color, blazing with a vague wonderment that would ignite even the coldest of hearts. You used to read, and not many liked to read beyond necessity; you intrigued me with your elegant quotes from obscure books, the meanings of which seemed beyond my understanding. But you knew what they meant, and you knew so much more back then than you know now. As you started to wear contact lenses as opposed to glasses, and as you paid less and less attention to daisies and more towards lipstick and cosmetics, the crows turned you into something I didn?t want you to become. I saw you die when you gave your last half-hearted goodbye wave to me; giving a promise so fragile that it broke as soon as you made it, but I doubt you remember your own death; the last few days that you spent with me were so bland and artificial that they were not worth treasuring even to me. We then ceased to know each other; or rather, you ceased to be you. I remember that on the day you left, I rushed towards you with tears running from my eyes, wanting to hold you in a tight embrace so as to save you as much as I can, but when I opened my eyes, all I could see was a withered tree with a cold bark, crows on its branches.
And the next day, the already wilting flowers disappeared and turned into parched soil. I feel my blood turn black with poison as you disappeared, and at present, I could see you dissolve into a cesspool of shadows. Perhaps you were suffering deep inside as they ate you alive; perhaps you harmonized willingly to the perceived melody of whatever the majority claimed was great, the only thing I could do in order to allay my sadness was to believe in the earlier. If there?s anything I have learnt from my days on this doomed planet, I would have learnt that the fantasy of the minority deep inside; the blind, poetic hope of the untouched remnant, was completely and utterly false. For you were just as prone to falling as the next person; the aura of innocence was one that could be easily stepped on, trampled, destroyed through repeated attack, and that was what happened here. You did not recognize me as you walked past; you left me in the lurch; you left me alone to die, after all. The blonde dreadlocks that hanged beside your cheeks, the thick-rimmed spectacles that you used to wear, your favorite novel, which you used to read; these things have left and will never remain. The story of a man?s fall from grace; his objectives in life reduced from serving a divine entity to the hoarding of gold guineas by the shredding of hopes and dreams; it enchanted you so. Those were the first words I heard you say, sitting on a rock, not directed at me but to yourself, that anyone who had to be forced by some evil entity to forsake his life and turn into the miserable wretch depicted by the book was the poorest person in the world. There was more to the tale but you were no longer there to read it; you contradicted yourself, really. We knew each other for a relatively short time anyway.
? you ran your fingers through the golden coins, and as your raised your hands, the coins fell down onto the floor with a satisfying clatter, eyes fixed in dazed wonderment.I?m a bystander now, perhaps. You disappear into a dark corner with your so-called friends, without once ever acknowledging my existence. You look pretty as always on the outside; through the cosmetics and the lipstick, I see what you once were, but that makes it more painful, very simply. The waft of cigarette smoke filled the air as I walked in the opposite direction, feeling a sense of disappointment and despair, but never crying, for there were no such things as genuine tears here nowadays. We both died for different reasons and in different ways, but we end up being the same thing, hollow beings with little substance. It?s just that you find comfort in many of your kind, while I take comfort in the form of a dream? fleeting in its appearance as I appear and vanish whenever he manages to sleep.
Your laughter filled the air like a sweet fragrance that I could not perceive. Not innocent laughter, from our early days, but the ironic laughter which masked venom behind a thin veil, which grew more prevalent and odorous as you drifted away.
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Gradually, the scene made way for a tree atop a hill, the starless sky as a depressing backdrop to an already depressing subject matter. It was almost as if I went back in time, catching a gleaming jewel of the long past, only to watch it pass ethereally through my wrinkled hands and vaporize into smog and smoke. I step towards the tree and no longer hear the cold rustling of the grass against my feet; I glance over the cliff and am unable to see the river stretch out towards the horizon, nor the stars glimmer brightly in the night sky. Nothing had changed in the year that had passed, her tombstone stood still in the night, none the more aged than when it first appeared. It was just me and her, no distractions; no irrelevant deceptions.
I placed my hand on the contorted bark of the old, barren willow, looking down with a sense of great reminiscence; a glimmer of color seemed to emanate from the downtrodden bark as I caress your face, but it disappeared as soon as I took notice of it? a dark hemisphere seemed to surround us under close guard, as if the nightmares and the phantoms knew what was happening and decided to watch more closely; as if any tinge of emotion would threaten their very existence, and had to be contained at all costs. I could feel a venomous chill in the air taking shape and form; a dark wind blew across the fields, atmosphere deathly cold, foreign shadows crawling beneath the trees, threatening to penetrate into my heart and soul, like a malignant cancer of the mind. What I felt was not necessarily pain, but rather, a kind of pressurizing discomfort, the gradual decline into the slow death that claimed her soul, as she looked over the cliff a year ago, reaching out to the stars and trying to grasp them.
But what really happened that night, when the grass was green, the moon was full, and the stars were shining light and bright? There was little presence of the shroud that seemed to converge around my position, it was as natural as it should be; the tall buildings of the cities and the neon lights were so far away, towards the horizon, we saw them as spectators, and they seemed to portray a benign sense of innocence as they flickered and moved, as if they were fun to watch for hours on end.. The river gave off an azure glow in the darkness as it led off into the sea, where the lighthouse roamed within the darkness of the nightscape, and where the waves made their silent crashes onto the rocky shore. The friendly croaking of the crickets; the sight of fireflies gathering around the great tree with its branches stretching out to sea, near the craggy cliff, performing their ceremonial dances as they prepared to die bright and happy each day, all of these contributed to an atmosphere awash with wonder, full of the affinity that nature could exhibit so wonderfully and simply, calling out for us to extend that cohesion towards one another. We were nine and young, we played with the twigs and the branches, we climbed the great oak tree without hesitation, with a fondness for its trunk, we picked morning lilies as purple as velvet and sniffed them, laughing at each other when one of us had an uncommon reaction; her face usually sweetened while mine usually soured? we placed our school bags at the bottom and usually forgot about them until we were well on our way home, we folded mathematical symbols and scientific jargon into airplanes and threw them over the cliff; this was our life, our haven, our escape? and they took it away; I couldn?t even bear to turn back, for there would be no remnants of the time we spent together; whether it be twisted steel or parched ground behind me, I didn?t want to see it; a dark wind blew across the land, the smell of rotting flesh presented a stark contrast to sweet fragrance, and everything was so sad that my heart was numb towards feeling.
I wonder, did the shadows eye upon her as they gazed at me, beneath the trees and the flowers? Did the ghosts and phantoms crawl close to the ground, closer and closer to her as she looked upon the stars and stretched out her hand to them, trying to catch them as childishly as many times before; while I sat on a grey rock, watching her from afar with a vague sense of affection as the full moon cast its great, feminine glow, did they murder her like a thief in the night, stabbing her heart and taking her away? For there was no greater misery than watching her walk back from the craggy cliff, her eyes as dull as a monochrome monograph, her hair no longer as lustrous as before, the way you walked towards me was different; first the clumsy movement of a marionette on strings, then the seasoned movement that seemed strangely uniform; no longer was there a skip in your steps, your skin was pale. I felt my blood turn black with poison and my heart make scattered breaths of agony when you stood in front of me, a plastered and hollow smile on your face, the time-honored deception device that fooled both the blind and the experienced, the resource from which awkwardness and dishonesty burst forth; we agreed on this a long time ago, didn?t we? Like one of her earlier books showed me, the evil men always smile, but you are a different person now; as you reached out your hand to me to give a handshake, I imagined a little bit of her inside your hollow shell, screaming out to me; we met with a handshake, we shall part with one too. I gripped your hand with downtrodden eyes, trying to hide my tears by remembering her and trying to smile genuinely to her, one last time. It was cold and clammy, lacking the warmth of blood and spirit; she died as you strangled her and suppressed her; the strings tightened. I then looked at you; you pulled your handshake away whispering an empty goodbye, you walked away without saying anything more, and my hands still held the book that she wanted me to take care of, cover picture showing the teardrop fall into the lake; how the magical instant seemed to dominate both the senses of sight and sound?
? the ensuing silence was so deep that I could hear the water in the grassy pond sleeping, the plants around me withering; I could smell the evening fragrance of lilies and daisies fade away as the fireflies started to fall without replacement. No longer did she, lithe and pretty, grace the hill, the stars twinkled and faded into the background, the great tree suddenly seemed old, sickly, barren as it seemed to bend over by some invisible force; the grass became more and more brittle as I started running down the hill, and I heard not rustling, but the quiet cracking of broken blades of grass; they seemed to give a dull brown glow as I ran further and further down, I could see a weak but present red afterglow cast over my surroundings, as red as the eyes of the crow; she was the hill, I realized, she gave it its curiosity, its sense of wonderment, complex theories that gave simple conclusions, she was its very embodiment, linked through both heart and soul, and when I tired myself out and couldn?t run anymore, and looked back, the sight of smoke and smog in the midst of cars met my eyes; the deafening noise struck a deep chord within. I was on the sidewalk, wearing my schoolbag, walking back from school, it seemed. It was afternoon time, the distant ringing of the school bell for six-graders and above reminded me of the friendly croaking of the crickets, but when I looked through the opening in the buildings, the hill was no longer there, and there was no longer anyone beside me.
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I started shedding tears in the heat of my thoughts; utter resentment at the inevitable spread of this disease and my inability to stop it; the demons and shadows that surrounded me, long forgotten in my line of thought, seemed to be held back by something so sweet and reflective as tears, and they engaged in gradual retreat to give me silence? To salvage the hill from the scraps of dreams and nightmares was a gift that I was empowered with, a consolation for fading away from the real world into the illusionary, and even then, it was a corrupted farce in face of the real thing. This was where it was permanently locked away; their vision of the world was mechanical, uniform, emotionless, giving favor only to the routine and nothing else. And slowly, day by day, I found it harder to gather their dreams and experience them, for many have long since stopped dreaming as they sleep, unaware of what they are missing, able to yearn for grassy fields and open plains only as some distant fiction seen in advertisements and posters. My world of dreams have, as a result, become pale as well; there are no longer any quirky curiosities of interest; all I could see now were barren, whitewashed trees in a field of endless snow as I wait patiently for my end, against the backdrop of an endless sky full of seagulls.
I know she used to dream. So did I; we had the hill, the sky, the sea, the river, the tree, the lighthouse, the stars, and the fireflies all to ourselves, and never will I forget those privileged days. But only I held those dreams and feelings now; they would find me and dismember me one day, and that memory would die with me, with no one else to share? I heard static cackling as the dream fizzled hazily, as the fabric of the sky started to break apart. I embraced her one last time, saying goodbye; the world blanked out by the sudden onslaught of white as he awoke into slumber, ready for another school day and lessons on the nature of electrical currents.