Platonic Whisper.

Thick seaweed wrapped her body, encasing her in a slimy tomb.
The lungs that I assumed were still in her chest had long since ceased.

The waves licked at the skin that slowly began to peek its way out from the plants that had entangled themselves around her limbs.
Her non-too-elegant position quickly suggested the lifelessness laying where salted drops met gritty grains and coarse stones.

The moon's borrowed light cast deep violets, vivid blues, glowing greens and neutral browns into soft illumination.

From above, it was difficult to decide whether she had drifted from the ocean to the jagged shoreline or if she had simply always been clogged between the stationary rocks and persistent white capped waves.

The sick poetic beauty struck me rather suddenly as my thoughts glided to a queer halt.

For the seconds I stood, perched precariously above her haunting ground, my own existence, my own issues and desperate searching, my own heart and hollow breathing seemed to still.

It wasn't until my mind once again began to click click, in tune with the tide, that her death, her long lost life, affected me.

In those few seconds, a platonic relationship was born.

The span of time in which it hung to me never truly faded. Even after I had shut my car door, crunched the gravel beneath my feet on the path to my front door, and flipped off the switch to my bedroom light; even decades into the future, when I had married and fathered my own children, spoiling theirs.

It was all such story book normalcy, my life.
The bumps and hardships were merely interesting peaks where my own curiosity broke the pattern.

What had become of her, what had been, it was all only fictitious images formed by my creativity.

I dragged the memory through my years, eating the concept and duplicating the picture in the only mildly intriguing fragment of my existence.

The pencil sketches, oil paintings and charcoal drawings neatly litter my attic home, there to be found, when I, myself, do, in fact, die.

But it will be a much simpler death, than hers.

Less inspiring, less poetic.


[Word Count: 363]