Chapter One - Some Kind Of Broken.

Some kind of broken.



Eyes, hit the floor like stone baubles, no hope rings from the thud of their harsh kiss with the floorboards, just heaviness.

Just a heavy lack of lightness, the same that now clings to his once youthful skin like a thin casing of ashes.

The ashes of what corpses?

I long to ask so many questions. What is this that clings to him?

I want to ask him why.

However, I do not, simply because I know waiting will prove more fruitful than wasting my petty persuasions on this dear friend of mine.



As I spend my patience graciously, my hands hugging my cold hips underneath my trencher I ignore the disapproving tick of the clock by counting the lines on his face.

Only late twenties.

Still handsome, but I always imagined creases ascending from the corner of each of his eyes like rays of sunlight piercing through soft cloud, spelling more than contentedness upon his face…

Spelling “ageing with exhilaration” across his upper cheeks.

Instead, here I am examining his souvenirs from all the emotions he ever visited, and I am heartbroken…because they spell out nothing but some kind of broken.

He does not even have the romantic demeanor of the heady, injured soldier, no sensual wound in his gaze. Instead of battle scars, an extension of ones character they seem no more than proof of the lack of something formerly inherent in his very being.

He is diminished somewhere internally.

Either his insides had disintegrated from their former glory to a cobwebbed grey abyss or the gates to his once heavenly internal paradise that I spent so many nights praying to enter had closed in a way I had never foreseen as possible.



Progress will be slow, I accept, as the clock strikes its tenth minute round. I commend the little time machine for its bravery through that long silence, rise, and kiss my dear one on the forehead. The shitty coffee that sat cold in my only mug remained on the table, unloved and growing to an age most cups of coffee should not till morning.

“Wait,” he speaks, soft.

I pause at the doorway to my kitchen, my back to him, I am frozen in the hope that he cannot see my lungs have ceased movement.

“Can you turn off the light as you leave?”

I sigh a cloud and flick the switch. I leave darkness to fall onto its lover, my ex, my friend, the stranger in my kitchen and I leave him there to make love to her and brood within his deceptive mistress’s bosoms.

I pray the silence her visits bring remove some barriers from his eyes for tomorrow.

I am eager to reach my bed, though I know it holds no promises of sleep.

Emotional exhaustion had just thumped me more abruptly than ____.