Trying to rid myself of writer's block. Three Prompts: Romance, Fire and Sadness. This spawned.
The fire flickers, the fire burns, and the world keeps on turning.
She meets you on the Vodkatrain. It’s simple, it’s sweet. Dark nights through Russian countryside and rickety carriages, sneakily walking through lantern-lit corridors with the hum of metal wheels on metal tracks filling the air and the euphoria of sneaking on a train in the dead of night.
It’s almost storybook, and she steals your cigarettes and hides them under cushions, seats, bookshelves and suitcases in order to steal a second of your time and attention. Chases you through every city stopped at along the way, from St Petersburg to Ulaanbaatar. Hectic, fast, childish.
Beijing, China. End of the tracks. You split at a stall that sells the most horrid of delicacies. You glance at a tray of spider legs and grimace, distracted for only a second, and she becomes lost in the crowd. Engulfed, hidden, and gone. Only when home, too many hours later and almost crying from Jetlag, do you spot the sticky note attached to the empty packet of cigarettes. It’s vague, incomprehensible, was she drunk when she wrote this?
You meet her again in Georgia. It’s raining; she’s wearing a sundress despite it all and cockily twirling a packet of your favourite cigarettes as though she’s been waiting by the lamppost for the past year without a care in the world. A sweet kiss in the rain. A fumble in a motel room. Vegas awaits, you win on a machine and once again she’s lost in the congratulatory crowd that surrounds you.
Elven, France, is next. You spot her standing on the top of the octagon keep. You’d swear she was stalking you, but you don’t even know each other’s names. Your cigarette’s hit you in the chest as you make your way up to her, and only distractedly do you notice she’s wearing your scarf.
You’d lost that in Vegas.
You lose her again in a crowd of tourists.
The routine stays the same, every meeting either swift or long and always a fiery whirlwind of emotions. Heidelberg is next, followed by Shimonoseki, Prague, Cairo, Puerto Rico, Jerusalem, Athens, Lindos, and finally back in the St Petersburg train station where you caught your first glimpse.
You make her your bride.
She finds out why you travel so much. She breaks, sobs and shakes so violently her back aches and her ribs crack from the strength of hugging herself together. She rants, she rages, she hates, she kicks and screams and curses all deities known. Haunted eyes bore into your own, and you know you’ve made a mistake.
Whether that mistake is telling her, or whether it’s marrying her before telling her, you’re not sure, but now she’s looking at you like a dead man walking. You begin to hate her for that look, because that’s exactly what you are.
Three years later, and the sickness really kicks in. You’ve weeks left, and she knows it. She wears the brightest smiles if only to make your lips tilt upwards just a millimetre, wears your favourite sundress and snug jeans, and sweeps into the hospital at every opportunity with a grin that makes you ache in sadness.
It’s not just you who is dying. She is too. She is dying from pain at watching you suffer, and from the knowledge that once your heart stops beating her world will lose all colour and she’ll be only a void. You fill her up with food, drink, even alcohol on your last days, but the void is growing and it won’t be filled.
At your funeral, she doesn’t cry. Can’t cry, really. She’s numb, drags herself out of a cold bed on a morning, never notices if the shower is warm or cold, walks to work like a zombie and simply stares into a glass of alcohol whenever she’s dragged from the house by concerned friends.
She does, however, shiver. Not from cold, but from heat. The fire that eradicates you from the earth crawls along her skin and burns, burns, burns, and the shining light behind her eyes is burnt to a crisp. Time has stopped for her the moment she scatters your ashes, but the world keeps turning.
Days fade into weeks, weeks into months and months into years, a gradual steady blur of the same routine. There’s no feeling, no spark, no colour to the world and the brightest thing to enter her day is when she sits in the chair by the fireplace and imagines you sitting across from her with a ridiculous fact to tell her that she never really needs to know, but misses all the same. She goes through all the stages of grief, and finally, at acceptance, she seems too far gone to ever be saved. Suicide is not in her repertoire, you know this, but her friends stay on the watch nonetheless. They clearly don’t know her like you did.
You plant the idea in her head. Venice.
She walks alongside the waterways, marvels at the Carnivale, and at the masked parade she bumps into him. He drops his cigarettes, removes his mask in order to bend down to pick them up, and she’s enraptured. She smiles for the first time in ten summers. A genuine, blinding smile. The Void becomes filled.
She meets him in Venice.
And it starts again.