Riven

Tired sunlight fell through the decrepit shutters, glazing the wood floorboards in bars. The room itself looked exhausted, like it had long ago been used up and no longer had a reason for existence. It was hard to imagine the room ever being anything but worn bare.
It looked ruined. This couldn’t just be attributed to the broken things littering the room—the broken glass in a picture frame, the dented guitar case propped against a wall, the blackened lamp shade and smashed bulb—but to something in the very material, the walls and floor and soul, of the room itself. It hadn’t welcomed a breath of fresh air in ages. Something almost tangibly suffocating lay over it like a blanket, screaming silently for release.
Disturbing thick dust, a pair of heavy boots stepped slowly into the room.
Something invisible snapped.
She stepped forward slowly, her breathing impossibly quiet. She took in everything around her as if finally experiencing a moment she’d carefully prepared herself for.
Most of the room lay in darkness, so much so that one could only hope to make out shapes and outlines. It didn’t seem to make any difference to her as she stopped before a relic of a bureau, and she raised a hand to its dust-laden top delicately. Her careful fingertips met a porcelain mask painted in bright colors which were completely lost beneath dust and darkness, a chipped trifle that someone had once painstakingly glued back together. She absentmindedly traced a slow spiral down from the corner of the mask’s left eye, uncovering an identical painted spiral beneath the grime. The corner of her expressive mouth twitched.
Her roving hand gently caressed the side of a vase containing withered and decaying roses. A finger barely brushed one of the flowers, and petals crumbled to ashes. She jerked her hand back, eyebrows drawing together involuntarily, and moved away from the dresser and towards the beaten-up guitar case.
She paused before it, considering. A slender hand stretched out before her and gingerly undid the clasps. She pried it open as if preparing to peek into a casket, and discovered something that surprised her unnecessarily: a cheap guitar, scratched and clinging to three of its six strings. She didn’t touch it. She just looked, fingers twitching slightly, reliving the ghost of an old song the guitar had once known. She left the case open.
Finally, she came to the sagging bed and carefully set herself down on it. It groaned in protest. Her eyes glided across the room arbitrarily and then rested blindly on a cracked glass surface with a photograph imprisoned behind it.
Her breath stuck in her throat.
Eyebrows drew together again; lips parted slightly; fingers stretched out towards the nightstand as if reaching for a dream.
She drew the photo to her face, disbelieving. It wasn’t enough. She held it out from herself, into the slanting light that crawled through the shutters, and she knew her eyes hadn’t been deceived.
The photograph, like everything else in the room, was half-hidden under a layer of dust and grime. The shapes of two people could vaguely be made out beneath the filth, standing side-by-side. But at some point in time, recently enough that dust hadn’t reclaimed its hold, someone had drawn a thumb across one person’s face to make it visible. It was her own face staring back at her.
Her free hand lifted to her mouth with a will of its own and pressed against her lips. She set the photo gently down on a pillow, eyes glistening, and stared at the memento for a moment before slowly folding over to hide her face in her knees. Her entire body shook silently. She wouldn’t allow herself a sound. She had never believed it, never thought she would. How could she?
Love never died.