Juxtaposition

One Upon A Time

Then:

We held hands on the last night on earth. Our mouths filled with dust, we kissed in the fields and under trees, screaming like dogs, bleeding dark into the leaves. It was empty on the edge of town but we knew everyone floated along the bottom of the river. So we walked through the waste where the road curved into the sea and the shattered seasons lay, and the bitter smell of burning was on you like a disease.In our cancer of passion you said, "Death is a midnight runner." The sky had come crashing down like the news of an intimate suicide. We picked up the shards and formed them into shapes of stars that wore like an antique wedding dress. The echoes of the past broke the hearts of the unborn as the ferris wheel silently slowed to a stop. The few insects skidded away in hopes of a better pastime.

I kissed you at the apex of the maelstrom and asked if you would accompany me in a quick fall, but you made me realize that my ticket wasn't good for two. I rode alone. You said,"The cinders are falling like snow." There is poetry in despair, and we sang with unrivaled beauty, bitter elegies of savagery and eloquence.Of blue and grey. Strange, we ran down desperate streets and carved our names in the flesh of the city. The sun has stagnated somewhere beyond the rim of the horizon and the darkness is a mystery of curves and line.Still, we lay under the emptiness and drifted slowly outward,and somewhere in the wilderness we found salvation scratched into the earth like a message

---

Now:

Once, she had looked at him with a knowing sparkle in her eye, as if she were hiding some great truth she wanted to share with him. Now when she looked at him, there was still a warm love in her eyes, but her secrets were all told. He was the one with something to hide now; she would never -- could never -- know the power she had held over him. Had she but asked, it would have been given; had she picked up the phone he would have come. But she did not ask, and she did not call, and for that, he breathed a sad sigh of relief.

He knew how that story ended, yet would have been helpless to stop it had she simply spoken the right words. So he kept silent even while his heart was screaming, and at long last the spell was broken. He smiled softly back, wondering what she saw in his eyes. She was beautiful, and she was happy. And he was free.

The End