It was so bright that we thought the world had ended right then and there. And yet, I could feel him in my arms, I could smell his sweat, hear his breathing. It would’ve been a funny end-of-the-world, there in his parents’ car, in a parking lot that smelled of baked concrete.
“Hey, are you there?” I whispered. It was so white that it could no longer be described as white. It was pink, green, black, yellow, it was everything but white.
“What do you think happened?” I asked, holding him even tighter than before.
“Don’t you know?” he said. “We’re dead. This is how death feels like. Your last moment, glitching forever.”
I parted my lips to reply, but all I could do was breathe.
“Should we get out of the car?” he asked.
“Because…” he began, but his voice trailed off. I could sense his mouth closing. He fell silent.
Closing my eyes had no effect on the light. There came a point when I couldn’t even tell if my eyes were open or not. It didn’t seem to matter at all. I pulled my hand away from his back and touched my eye. Yes, my eyelid was down. My eyes were closed.
“Hey,” I said, “Tell me. Are your eyes closed? Would you be able to see me, if you could?”
“I see you now,” he said. “Just not with my eyes.”
I groaned. It wasn’t the first time he’d said something like that, although these were new circumstances. Pulling away, I felt for the door handle and opened the door.
Yes, there was still a concrete floor below me. That was reassuring. We weren’t floating in a void after all. And I was definitely holding the car door. And he was sitting inside. I could slam the door, but what if his fingers were caught in the middle?
“Are we blind now?” I asked. “For good, I mean?”
I heard the other car door open, boots crunching, and then the door slamming shut.
“You know what real blindness is?” he asked, and I pre-emptively groaned. “Real blindness is when you can’t remember your lover’s face. Or your parents’ faces, or your pets’ faces. That’s a blindness of the soul. You can’t fix that.”
“What about this, this right now? This just white field of nothingness? You see it too, don’t you?”
“Who says it’s nothing?” he said back. I felt him take my hands up in his, lift them high to touch his cheeks. “It’s everything, don’t you think? That’s why it’s white. White is when every colour comes together.”
“Isn’t that the same as no colour, though?” I asked.
His body pressed against mine, and I felt his jaw on my shoulder, his hair against mine. “It was good, wasn’t it?” I asked. “While it lasted.”
The white began to fade. Slowly, faintly, colour began to seep in.
“Yeah,” he said after a while. “It was good.”
I began distinguishing the blue of the sky, and the grey of the parking lot, the faded red of the car. I began distinguishing my blinks.
“Goodbye,” I said to him.
“Goodbye,” he said to me.
ellievsbear
vaporwave
dededos
discoholicmusic
theartofmadeline
annaxmalina
