Anthrophobia: My muse brings yours flowers.
Sunlight filters down through the trees, glittering beads of gold in the gaps between brilliants greens, and she finds herself in a dream, swaying on heavy air. Her feet glide over the soil, and she can’t see where she is going, surrounded by endless green, in a world that never ends, stretching as far as her gaze does. There is warmth on her skin, prickling heat that seeps into her bones and fills her with radiating happiness. There is not much more to the world than this feeling, and she is content, letting the blades of grass tickle the space between her toes, daisies sprouting in the barren soil left behind by her footsteps.
She never looks back, because she cannot.
Everything is soft, the edges blurred by the haze of light. And he too, rough and angular, vicious and wronged, is sweetened, muted as he sits at the base of a tree, counting flower petals as pale as the sickly glow of his skin. He is young again, pure, untouched. Naivety captured in a scene that lasts forever.
She moves towards him, one step at a time, drunk on a dream of peace that no longer belongs to her (and perhaps it was never meant to). The skin of her knees bleeds, scratched and torn away when they rest against the soil, her eyes now leveled with his. Their gaze meets, and in the midst of this soft, hazy world, his eyes are perhaps the only thing clear. He lifts the flower, just as she lifts her own hands, the tree turning black behind him, the smile on his face widening. The world is silent, soft, glittering beads of light blinking out as her hands inch towards the chrysanthemum, and when her fingers slide over its soft petals, his skin falls away, peeling back to reveal unearthly darkness, the sound of shrieking filling a once quiet world, a dream slowly turning to reality. The world is endlessly void, and she is swallowed by the darkness, the whispers following her speaking from bones once light and sweet. There is no end, a dead horizon on each side of her, the sky turning black, the flower rotting, its petals falling between the gaps in her fingers. And though she never notices, he too is gone, falling into obscurity in the now bleak universe.
She wakes, covered in sweat, the whispers fading to silence. The debt is unpaid.
