Work Text:
It starts with a pain in your chest, fire spreading through your body, like your veins were on fire with every moment. It’s a pain you can’t understand, you’re not hurt. You didn’t get injured, you’re physically fine. It’s as if your very soul itself was ablaze, threatening to consume and to wither away in an instant.
The sun is no longer warm. You do not feel comforted by it. For the past few months, the warm sunlight does nothing but etch away at your bruised soul, exposing the raw pain as it erodes all that is you.
Sunlight… why is it sunlight?
You had half a mind to consider yourself a vampire, but the very idea was preposterous.
-
There was a festival recently. You watched the fireworks through your apartment window, watching the fleeting beauty pepper the night sky. Every explosion was like a punch to the gut, every crack of the fireworks a slash to your already bleeding heart. You physically cannot take your eyes away from the spectral display, locked into place. Almost like it was the first time you ever experienced fireworks. But you know it wasn’t your first time, you’ve seen them countless times, so why now? Why can’t you look away now??
Before you could comprehend it, warm streaks of liquid trailed down both of your cheeks. The salty streams dripped onto the floor, leaving you a sobbing and sniffling mess. You only remember curling up into a ball on your bed, sobbing into your pillow that smelled like someone you had never met before.
Why does it hurt so much? It’s as if you’re grieving someone who doesn’t exist, someone you don’t know and will never know.
It’s as if your soul was grieving the loss of your other half, the person that completed you, that made you whole. A person you can’t remember.
—
Wilted petals fall onto your desk. Sunflowers you don’t remember receiving, wilting in a vase you don’t remember putting them in. You can’t bring yourself to throw them away, as if the slightest movement would crumble them into dust. Sometimes you stare at them, perplexed and confused. Who gave these to you? And why can’t I remember it?
Why sunflowers?
Lately you’ve started snuggling your pillow, taking comfort in a foreign, yet familiar scent. It’s like if moonlight could be turned into a scent, leaving an impression on your senses forever. You inhale it, the smell of who he was consuming your presence. And for the first night in months, you sleep peacefully. No nightmares of falling into an abyss. No pain. Only soft comfort, as if the moon itself was wrapping you in a hug. You could swear you felt someone beside you, if only for a moment.
Every day you try to remember who this person was. The person you seemed to have cared so deeply for, but your mind draws a blank every single time. It’s as if the act of trying to remember brought searing, white hot pain to your very soul. As if someone went inside the very depths of your soul, and stole what made you, you. As if they erased that very part of your existence, and tossed you aside. But you push past the pain, trying to connect to yourself, trying to remember.
One afternoon, while cleaning, you found hair clips you swore you had never bought in your life. One was a sunflower… another was a cute skull. You stood there, tears welling in your eyes for a reason unknown to you. You clutched the hair clips so tightly they dug into your skin, slicing it open and leaving a nasty gash.
You couldn’t bring yourself to care. The inconveniencing pain of a small cut incomparable to the soul shattering despair of grief with no one to love.
A fluff of white hair pops into your mind. The memory is painful, fleeting, but recognizable. You pick up the nearest pen and paper, and with your bloodied hand, begin to sketch what flashed in your mind in an instant.
You can’t remember his face, you only remember layered, long, white hair. Your hand whips around the paper, trailing blood along the page as you ignore the pain and try to commit what little of him to memory that you have left. You try to sketch a face, and fail, there’s no way you could recreate that when you have no idea what he looks like.
Maybe he never existed. Maybe I’m misremembering.
Splotches of blood smear across the paper. Droplets splatter onto the eyes you’ve sketched, and it’s like an epiphany in your soul.
Crimson red eyes.
You sob, tears streaming down your face, gazing at the sketch of a man you’ve never seen before. Where did you go?