This one is a sci-fi piece, off-prompt, that explores an aspect of love. Hope you enjoy it. If you do, please feel free to comment and share. And if you don't like it, please let me know why.
Unrequited
by Celeste Hollister
Word Count: 455
Safe for Work
In the end, we left empty-handed. We
boarded our ship and left everything behind.
I dream about you, though. Such
breathtaking splendor, those ice-penciled peaks, the crystalline
pools, the star-spun cloth of midnight sky.
When I wake, I smell the
cinnamon-fragrant reeds that waved at river's edge. I taste the
honey-cool springs that fed the lake beside which we once slept.
It's easy, now, years hence.
Deceptively simple to recall your glory, to forget the heartache.
Even as I write these words, I feel the twinge in my fingers, once
twisted beyond recognition by the jaws of that snarling monster.
Though terror struck me blind at the moment of attack, I can look
back and understand. It felt threatened. It was afraid. Or maybe it
was hungry. Maybe I appeared like a tempting morsel as I paddled at
the water's edge. As insignificant as a worm on a hook.
Either way, it was not the only
creature to shed blood that afternoon. We killed it, and others. We
left a trail of bones in our wake. After all you gave us, we answered
with blood.
The doctor chides me. She says I
should not focus on the past, that I should turn my eyes to the
present moment, that I should live second to second, breath to
breath.
I did that. I tried.
But every breath here is poison. Every
second a lie. How can I explain that my heart remains fixed on a
world light years away, beyond the reach of any of us? When people
talk of finding love, do they only mean humans, or can a person also
love a place?
I have no pictures. I lost my ability
to sketch. I kept not a single stone, not a feather, nor a scale.
Yes, I damaged the records containing your coordinates. They called
it sabotage, but if we could not stay, then no one else would find
you, not so long as I was alive to prevent it.
Now in the evening, I sit upon my
rooftop. Beneath me, the city boils under a blanket of smog. My
nostrils fill with the oily stink of cookfires and exhaust. My skin
roughens from yet another scrim of blisters. The tea I drink tastes
of sweat, and I long for a mouthful of your sparkling snow upon my
tongue.
A creeping deluge slowly swallows
earth. We'll roast to death long before the waters claim us. There is
no hope that I will ever return. But if the ancients are right, that
we choose our fate upon our passing from this life to the next, then
I beg for us to be reunited.
Only then will I know peace.
Only then, in the end.
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