The Death of a Falling Rose.

There is an emptiness of soul, an intense futility of mind and that dawdling, fluid awakening of the unconscious, all entwined with a subtle convolution around the aging night, that welcomes me with open arms as I lay awake in my bed, my pulse racing against the minutes trying to trace back into the reasons of my awakening and knowing that I will return to the torturous tranquility of my room as a hopeless warrior.
Above me is the ceiling, grey in the dim radiance of the oil lamp, smoldering away next to my bed; above that is the deep blue sky, parts of which, I now see from a gap between the heavy drapes covering the tall oaken window to my left. I close my eyes, hoping to drown in the loud silence that is so unnatural for a winter’s night. It is the silence, flooding over the chirping of the crickets, the soft breathing of my cat, and the whisper of a cold breeze passing through the trees outside and bouncing off the window glass, that fills up my ears with a hollow, constant, and frigid noise.
I can feel the beating of my heart, watch the rise and fall of my chest, and feel the rush of my pulse in the hand that now my head rests on. Shuffling beneath the sheets like a mouse, I slip up resting my back against the polished mahogany bed rest and take a deep, elongated breath, holding all the air out and never letting it back in, till I feel the iciness of my throat and the dryness cast upon my lip. There is a faint smell of burning oil at my side, the flame flickering, almost possessed, behind the stained, dusty glass. But more prominent then that is another smell. A smell that has been there since many weeks ago, many swollen months ago; the ethereal smell of a single garden rose, clipped neatly at the ends and shaved of all thorns; that lies peacefully under my pillow, waiting to be lost within the ashes of the hearth, where the fire now crackles with a slow, helpless, aching ferocity.
From where I sit, I see the coals black and orange and red, glaring back at me, from the mean, hot, and ravenous irons and stones of the fireplace, resting against the wall.
The colored heat seems to pierce into my eyes, flooding in through the small of my irises, pushing them open as it does so, reaching for those fragile, sensitive, electrified nerves, like a chasing dragon. I squeeze my eyes shut to the flaming storm and the dragon’s lashing, whipping tail. I squeeze them shut, till my eyelids begin to quiver and my forehead starts to ache. Somehow, in this battle between darkness and ferocious light, my hands slips; slips slowly, unknowingly, innocently wavered, to the right of this grand, grand bed, where there is no pillow, no blanket, no single, clipped red rose, breathing aromatically.
Here, my hands find that nothing, nothing at all but remains of a broken dream, a single burnt thread of promises, and the whites of a shredded web of truthful lies. My eyes still closed forcefully, my heart drumming to an unknown rhythm; I bend till my nose touches the covers in a whisper, and breathe in the blank smell, leisurely.
It is the smell, the smell of laundry, of yellow, fragrant washing soap, the smell of the warm sun, the maid’s rough hands, the laughter and mirth of this great, great city. It is, in short, the ironical smell of life.
In the haze of the dim lamp, the undisturbed sheets are a pale shade of white, the covers upon it a shimmering, subtle, smothered blue. There is beauty in its blunt nakedness.
From my corner of this chamber, I see everything wrapped in shadows, and stacked into proper corners. Yet my eyes, my lost, lost eyes, search for life in that pulsating darkness that wavers upon everything in a quiet grace.
All shadows are quiet, alive impressions of their givers; that, at least I am quite assured of through experience
As the night tightens its embrace I feel that I cannot take in its cold subtly any longer and so I must reach for the lamp and lighten it, till the fire inside blazed with all its amber anger.
Now, in the fiery glaze of this lamp, I no longer sit, but stand. My arms, numbly wrap around my chest, the silk icy smooth on my naked flesh.
And yet, as I stare into my eyes, in the egg shaped mirror, the fire igniting half my face, in a whitish glow, I see something queer that gives me a single, hard, electrifying, naked shiver that reverberates in my spine.
I can almost see in through the sinister hollow of my irises, so drowned between two perfectly circled murky lakes. Yet in that sandy white of my eye, the rest of it that is, the simple, poorly component of it there is a strange, regular peculiarity I have never met in the previous nights.
And in all its awkward naturalistic efforts, I see a stranger.
In the ashen glow of the lamp, while my features lay dull and lifeless, my lips parted and cracked like damp, old, infested wood, it is just two unknown eyes, smiling at my misery.
Pain is a bearable thing. It’s not the pain that aches in your heart that shrugs and giggles as you lay whimpering in the night. It is not pain that bleeds from your eyes, or whispers in your prayers. But it is pain that shines in the heart of love, that lays hidden behind a gleaming smile, and a broken heart. And like all beautiful things, it is too near yet too far, far away…
Or so I thought.
I watch those fiery, ferocious, forgotten eyes, and I know, like a blind mother who loses a child, that I have found it.
A small, scintillating, sickening smile spreads shortly on the face in the mirror.
Alone, alive, aghast I stand frozen, slowly melting away into the image. Perhaps it is the time of night, the liquidated darkness and the dewy gloom. Perhaps it’s the weakening of my weary nerves and the hardening of my soul.
Or perhaps, it is the unlocking of the deep dark recesses of my mind, keys for which had long been bathed in rust?
I know not what it is, but I know that whatever it may be, it drags me to myself, my horrid, putrid, and insolent self.
The night no longer pulsates with the last glimpses of the evening, and the silence along with the stillness, seems to have embraced my world and each of its sinew, in icy, thin, bewitched tendrils. In the comfort beneath sheets, with the small animal breathing steady on my palm, I had felt only a full emptiness. But as I stand here now, two drops of cold sweat running down my heaving chest, I feel like an ant stranded on crumbs of bread in the midst of a bowl of boiling, hot soup.
The mirror is a strange thing. It shows one what one denies to see, but again, a mirror will show you just what you desire. Yet tonight, its golden edges, its gleaming persona, seem to have enchanted its glow and sparkle.
With each warm breath I draw, I feel as if it is sucked into that void inside the mirror, inside two empty, hollow eyes.
Previous nights, when I had, if I dared, to gaze into the mirror, I had only seen signs, scars and silhouettes. I had seen the damaging of my soul, an utter destruction of purpose, a tastelessness of the senses. But what I see now, is a thought void of theories.
Yet I had one, all along.
I let my feet lead me, towards that stranger who now stares, mystified and not at all welcoming. Yet as I grow nearer and nearer, I feel it in its complete cold ethereality. Though the stranger’s lips part, she has no words for my ears. And, why should she?
But I see her now, as I have never seen anyone. I see her, exposed, enchanted and eerie upon the glass. Could it be me?
I touch the glass, with one shivering finger, but strangely, there is warmth where my finger meets that of my acquaintances. A strange sort of warmth, strangers never elude and neither do mirrors.
And I know then, I know what had always been racing within my pulse, I know that which had only hit me with glimpses. I know now, that I have found it alas. I have found beauty.
As if in celebration of my discovery, a single, sorrowful, serpent laugh echoes in the room. It is only when I look closely that I see the parted lips, the bared teeth and the reddened glimmer of the eyes in the mirror, that I know who owns it.
As if the laugh was a bead off a broken rosary, it is followed by a row of sounds. The first is the cold hissing of the cat, that now stares, its back arched right into my eyes, her own redder than mine perhaps. The next before the first is over, is that of flesh upon stone. The coloring of my acquaintance, in the perfect crimson, as she shatters like I once had not too long ago. A loud electrifying shiver escapes the central cords of my spine and runs all over my being. I watch as the skin in the midst of palm, begins to unstitch itself, forming a deep, bloody, hollow as it does so. With each stream of blood that gushes out, I feel another wave of electrified pain run up my body, and feel the liquidated warmth, trickle on my arms.
But as the blood falls in streams, the apparition in front of me seems to howl in amazed pain, for the mirror like frigid ice, seems to crack in slow, sugary, sedated crackings. Three fine ravines start digging their paths down hungrily.
I watch, in slow realization, as the scene unfolds itself, the drum beating faster and faster within my heart, awaiting the last horn, the deafening sound of reality…
I want to save her, because she begs for it. I want to save her, because no matter how much I might burn with red hate, she is another part of me is she not?
But as I see her gleaming eyes, her mocking smile, I also see the tensed wrinkles on her forehead, the blood upon her gown and the tear in her now wet hair that spreads further down…
Miracles; they had stopped happening long, long, long ago; When the space next to mine, started to smell of tobacco free laundry. When the glint of my laughter begun to feel like an empty champagne glass, when the cold edges of my shoulders begun to stink of solitude just like my hungry, hungry lust-less soul.
I stopped believing, when there was nothing left to believe for.
I seek the truth in her eyes, and I know that it needs a sign. A single, lonely tear bleeds out my left eye as I realize that my companion for the night is departing with its last sighs. Farewell, I think. Farewell, you stranger who are so close to me for being so. Yet I know what it deserves and so I let her take it. I rush to where the bed is and kneel on its side. I can see the heaven and hell played out on the silken sheets. It is deep inside hell that the rose lays, alone, in a kind of sad mourning, its fragile petals giving off their scents as if they were the last…
With two trembling fingers, I reach for it, and as I do so, I am sure that somewhere in the crimson of my heart there is a needle. A metallic, cold needle and it is now stabbing repeatedly on a wound.
But like all proper thoughts this does not last and as I run to the mirror my shivers reduce to shadows of their selves.
Back where the mirror stands, the woman is still there. Only she is staring with a strange ferocity of a caged beast, not at me but at that flower that sleeps in my hands.
I watch intently then, like I never have before. I wait and watch her, waiting, waiting for some revelation, for some reason to blame or to worship and finding none. Because in all her beautiful misery, she is much too similar to me, just that she is the petal and I, the thorn.
Just for s second, a single moment, a blink of an eye, a flash of a rising soul, we meet. We meet through the cracking glass, me and her, and the world with all its pain above and below, with all its people, dead or alive and its love and longing seems to be drunk like sake, between us. And like two lost lovers, we meet and greet, compressing oceans between us, each too scared to let go of the other. But before, we can sink in to ourselves, before we can let the tears come and the words boil, there is another sharper, heavier, angrier growl of the glass as the world we so boiled and baked, seems to shatter with ever increasing haste.
In the flash of deepening cracks, that now runs for her chest, a see a single glimpse. Not of blood stained apparitions, but of a beauty in white, with hair flowing and eyes glowing, her cheeks like plums and apples and her smile breezier than a summer’s day…
And in her hand, I see the rose, that now blooms and brightens and then just as soon it is gone.
In my own hands, I feel nothing but thin air….
It seems as if each subtle voice, each booming noise, seems to echo in the room, in a strange symphony and as the notes are hit higher and higher my breath tightens within my throat.
The remaining glass, come off its edge, with a single heavy whisper.
And in its cracks and edges I see blood, that trickles out with a calm to it.
Once again, the room is quiet. Once again I am alone.
But in that quiet, there is something different about my heart now. I walk back to the bed, my hand no longer bleeding but crusty and aching. I walk back, and I sit, with my back against the wood, and to my left where the laundry sheets are crumpled lay a single rose, now rotten and partially burnt. I touch it, with a single finger, and watch the stem dissolve to ashes and feel the roughness of the dried petals.
Something has changed indeed. For there in the night, I let out a low, piercing howl, and bury my head in my stained hands, and weep.
To my side, the lantern still burns, the cat sleeps soundly again, but the sheets are no longer clean, nor are they straight of wrinkles.
And with a dull, familiar sadness I know that they never will be crumpled like they used. I know I will never be warm like I was or as happy. It was an unintentional betrayal, and I know that now.
So I look up to the heavens and know that though his warmth would never dissolve into mine neither would our words merge or our love outgrow, but somewhere out there, he would wait and I could wait too…
So I sit there, as outside the sun rises with dazed haste, and I weep and weep some more.