"Ich riskier hier mein Leben, und Just verzeiht mir gnädig, dass nicht alles geklappt hat." - Die drei ??? und die Comic-Diebe
(translation: I'm risking my life here and Just forgives me graciously that not everything worked out.)
Your heart is still racing, adrenaline still tying itself into knots around your lungs after the deadly mask above you spun out into the clouded sky as your world was drowned by chlorine blue.
You want to say that you saw death, ready to tug you out of life if your body hit the floor instead. You want to scream, cry, get all this poisonous fear out of your system; remember that you are alive, despite. All you manage is an apology—tugged out before you can think on it, before you can scoff at the thought of apology in the wake of near-death. Before you can bite down the taste of bitter failure.
Your friend—too righteous, too curious, too fast to move on—sighs and forgives you, with his back already turned, his face contorted in that condescending smile of his. There is an echo of goading words and mocking encouragement between your ears.
Your throat grows tight with the smoke of your fury burning up the thread around your lungs. Eyes itching—from chlorine, from smoke, from looking up at death—you ball your fists.
Would he have forgiven you in death? Would he have given your coffin a sigh; gracious absolution for dying without getting him the answers you risked your life for? Would he have carved his words into stone? Forgiveness in the face of true failure—even in death, you wonder, would he have been so callous still?
You don’t ask again. You don’t want to hear another smiling agreement—snarking barbs about the inconvenience of your death as you hold on for dear life, teasing laughter as you hesitate—or even the unlikely guilt, now that you stand before him with your death pearling down your skin and soaking your clothes with mocking laughter.
You don’t want to know the answer to what he would have done; what his last condemnation would have been if your back had met concrete instead.
Your clothes cling to your skin, your heart slows amidst the bubbling tar of despair you know so well. He doesn’t thank you.
You wish you didn’t want him to.
origamiaround
blakekathryn
janainaart
turnnoffyourmind
gummygunk
pixelskylines
andulkaphoto
