Canyons

Feels like I haven't written anything in a while; not for lack of desire, but more from lack of inspiration. This one is a little different from previous things I'd posted up here, in that it's not quite as personal. I find it kind of interesting though, I might try to revisit this character sometime. There actually is something I'd seen a bit ago that motivates this piece and that I'd wanted to write something about, but it didn't really fit with where I am right now, emotionally and mentally, hence the need to create a character who it did apply to.

He wakes up in the middle of the night and hears her breathing echoing in the darkness. There is a gap between them, a chasm a foot wide with no bottom in sight, its walls worn away by months of injured silences and suppressed glances. How did they get there, they who had it all; who had nothing but each other. He is afraid if he reaches across he will fall, and yet he can already feel himself slipping and sliding, scrabbling for purchase in the slick soil and finding none. She's there but she is gone, miles away from him even when he looks her in the eyes. And he, where is he, where does that leave him? Where does he go from there?

Years later he wakes up and hears her no longer, feels her no more. She is gone, a decision that had been made by and without him. The world has moved on, and what does it all mean? Beside him lies another; her and not her, and he is sliding again, the world tilting around him. He is afraid, but of what: the darkness which hides, or the light which reveals? She is screaming in her sleep beside him, "Don't let me go, don't let me down, don't say you will," but he is unable to hear. The gap is widening again and he is digging, digging his own grave inch by inch and second by second, wondering all the while why the hole keeps getting deeper and deeper.

If you're wondering what it was that I saw (here comes your glimpse into my odd mind), it was actually a young man sitting on a crowded train. In this case, it was a 2, with the benches. This guy was sitting next to the pole that goes from the bench to the ceiling, but he'd left a distinctive gap between himself and the pole (you know how people normally sit right up against it), and so the two people sitting to his right were squished into the remaining space. That detail didn't really factor into what I ended up writing, of course, but seeing that (relatively) huge gap of empty bench got me thinking, and a while later this came out. So, there you have it.