Romance In Sepia
by Drusilla


Silence gave you invincibility. Outside, the rain washed away everything we knew, and you sat like stone, your eyelashes a veil over eyes that were stone. You couldn't blink, because then... then maybe the spell would be broken. My own eyes were heavy. The grayness seemed to seep into you; silent stalker, cancerous.

I had tears for you once. I used to dream of a paradise in colour, a plain of soft words and textile pleasures and you. Perfect symphony; only I've lost the tune. We left nothing but memories too painful to speak, but even these had to be locked away, kept safe like some treasure in our heads. Pain was mortal. Pain gave us life in a sense, so we held on as it slipped away.

Everything liked to slip away, didn't it? You could feel it like silk between your fingers, every strand fading underneath your touch. It didn't matter how hard you clutched at life. It disappeared into the wind.

Candlelight doesn't do you justice. It doesn't give you the gleam moonlight once did, doesn't settle on your features like a lumiere for a god. Better than darkness, anyways. You hated that the most, didn't you? In the dark your eyes played tricks on you. In the dark you could see ghosts.

In the dark you could forget, and that scared you most of all.

Yes, darkness seemed to choke you, but it didn't always be so. You used to revel in her, your weapon, your ally, your lover. She used to touch you in places even I could not.

There's a cigarette perched lazily between your fingers, and the smoke wants to curse us all. Thick and dark and then fading, gray like you've never seen. Your bird--it wants to fly away. I can hear the flutter of its wings within you, but there's nowhere to go. You gave it a name once, with the trembling of your voice, a momentary weakness. Trapped, it flung itself against the stone, a frenzy of feathers. Then it turned its beady eye towards you once more, and screamed Disaster.

The walls cave in on you, the air suffocates you like smog. The threat of emptiness is like a flood, carrying you slowly away, prisoner of your own fantasies.

Seventeen, and life's too much for us already. Seventeen and there's too much blood for the even the world.

You took my life away even then, but your fingers were so graceful, soft against me, and nothing else mattered anymore. I was falling and I was dead, my life spinning in your arms as memories, like the old daguerrotypes of grim faces too gruesome to be real. It was the old passion, romance in sepia and the curve of inked love.

For me, love was the pounding in my heart, the eerie strumming from within me, clinging to my veins like something alive. It smothered me yet gave me life, something more magical than anything we'd ever known. Perhaps this was the real magic? The real gift, the one they forgot to teach us, the real talent no one could learn?

For me, love was oxygen.

For you, catastrophe.