Echo of the Final Ring
It is raining.
The sky is a dark gray and cold, as if Nature is weeping with me. The cobblestone streets are slippery beneath my feet, and no one else is traveling on them. No one except perhaps the coroner or a few mourners would ever want to venture where I am going. It is a place where only dead people go; I am very much alive. Yet I will soon solve this juxtaposition.
A flash of lightening lights up the world for a moment, yet I do not hear the corresponding thunder. I place my calloused hands on the huge iron door—the rain has made it difficult to work with. With persistence, I make the door give in and open. If there is a creaking of the hinges, I do not hear it. The smell of death greets my nose with overpowering pungency, as if it is foreshadowing the fate of anyone who dares step inside here even for a moment, yet I am not alarmed from the smell; it is almost as if the smell is that of a sweet perfume—her perfume—rather than the ominous aroma of decaying flesh.
I am certain that she is here; I feel that she is here. Carefully making my way into the dark crypt, closing the door behind me, relying on dim light provided by torches perhaps left by one guard for another, I search. And there she is, nestled amongst those who have been here much, much longer than she has. Oh, what a beautiful contrast she is, even though now what I see is just a shell—she is not there, no longer within it to make the shell move and think and speak and dance . . . and yet, all the other shells around her are crumbling, almost dust now, old, withered, and she—she is fresh; she is hope that life can go on living; she is like a freshly-painted figure on a centuries-old canvas. Yet, despite this contrast, I know someday she, too, will wither away, and, fearfully, I approach.
I carefully lie beside her, trying to find a place of my own without disturbing the rest of those who lie so close to her. I lie down, not heeding to the cold, muddy water on the ground that seeps into my clothes. I reach out to touch her—oh, she is still warm!—and I gather her in my arms, something I am only able to do now because she is dead; if she were living, would she consent to this? I cannot answer this and I do not want to even attempt to come up with the answer. Her face, with its dark skin, raven hair framing it, is still aglow, even in death's malicious grip, and, unable to restrain myself, I lightly brush my lips against hers.
"I love you."
My mouth forms the words, but I hear nothing. How strange it is, to have gone through life with speech and yet never hearing my own voice. It is a comical thought, yet the comedy comes from the cruel irony of the two things—one an ability, the other a disability. Yet the string of cruel ironies that was my life would break whenever she was near me, and now, in death, with the shells that are our bodies forever entwined, forever inseparable, she will always be near me.
I draw her closer to me, feeling the last bits of warmth within her slowly starting to fade, like how the warmth begins to fade from a room after the sunlight coming into it from a window has been covered by the clouds. Again, I press my lips to hers, crying, saying, "I love you" over and over again and yet never hearing the repeated confession. And that is all I do as I wait. How much time passes, I do not know—soon, I do not feel the gnawing hunger that originally plagued me, begging me to eat; I feel nothing except a kind of weightlessness that must come with approaching death. And all the time, she is beside me, here in my arms, forever with me, and suddenly, I feel I am ready.
With a final kiss, a final, "I love you", I close my eyes, knowing that those last three words were the final rings of the death knell that only she could hear.