Work Text:
I waited for you.
Like a fool, I waited, hoping you would come around the corner, through the door, and call my name.
In your voice, my name was a thing of wonder. A laughing thing, desirous, needy. Something whispered and cried out during the interminable winter nights and the never ending summer twilight, when time was meaningless and replaced by breath and movement.
In your voice, my name was a word of power, calling my body to full, burning life once more.
But where were you now? And where was your voice?
When you left, I felt sure the sound I heard was my heart and not the slamming of the front door. The percussion took out my knees and I was quite unable to rise from the couch. Even if they had cooperated, my anger choked me and weighed me down as surely as the words I had held back. I sat there, running back through time to see how things might have gone, all the terribly clever comebacks I had missed and the points I hadn't made.
Scrubbing furtively at my face, I walked out through the kitchen, shaky as a newborn foal. Taking the cigarettes from their hiding place underneath the tea bags, I opened the back door and went out into the night. I felt my skin tightening as the cold hit me, goosebumps prickling along my flesh under the woefully inadequate sweater I wore. A shaky hand held the cigarette; it was making me nauseous, but I took a long drag. The nausea was a distraction from other things.
I sat there as the cold seeped into my bones from the frigid wind, and the colder concrete step upon which I sat. My jaw was clenched achingly tight, but whether that was from trying not to shiver or trying not to scream, I wasn't entirely sure.
A little bird alighted at the edge of the dead, frozen flower bed along the fence. It hopped pitifully along the hard and barren ground, long since scoured lifeless by the frigid wind. I watched it dig and pick through the dead grass, searching, and I felt something rising up the back of my throat. It huddled closer to the frozen ground as a sudden gust of wind batted the tiny creature savagely.
An unearthly howl sounded, and it took a moment for me to realize the sound was my own. My jaw had unlocked and spilled out the poison that had been choking me. Tears first burned and then froze my face as they escaped my treacherous eyes. I screamed at the stupid bird, I spat all the black bile in my soul at it. I screamed at it for staying when it should have gone south. For being pathetic. For looking for something where nothing, nothing existed anymore to sustain it. And I screamed at it finally for being able to fly away without a backward glance at me.
Wrung out and shaking, I snubbed out the remains of the cigarette and flicked it mindlessly away.