Sorry this took a while. I am exploring new pathways with several other works. I also got reared up at and struck by a horse, which complicates matters…It hit my typing hand! Well one of them…
So doth I persuade this story to venture from its moorings and accompany me into the shifting chords of unknown seas.
Disclaimer: I do not own this concept, this movie, these characters, or these symbols.
Edge of Oblivion
Sleep eludes her, and she hates him for it.
He lingers in these walls, every shadow concealing a harlequin smile. And it is not only her imagination, straining to snarl the threads of fate and bring them back to that icy station, where he eyed his fate in one of those blank windows.
And accepted that proverbial gauntlet.
She will have to leave. But not tonight.
She has found his room, a door where once she was sure there was none.
His costume hangs from one corner. The faint smirk ricochets off the broken glass, spilled like teardrops, and rebounds around the room. Her skull throbs with the weight of his empty gaze.
Blood leaks slowly onto the sheets. Small pieces of glass twinkle from her hand, like bracelets of blood. But with that pain comes release. One of her sleeves is wrapped tightly around the wound but it has become limp. Her world is shattered.
She stares, trying hard to accept. But it is so hard when he stands in the corner and watches her, when his scent arises from the bed, when she can almost hear the soft rumble of his voice from the jukebox, which croons the song they danced to with such fleeting passion.
She slides through the soft waves of sleep, between scintillating dream and the tranquility of silence. But there is no peace.
Not yet.
On the smooth marblewood table to her right, shines the deadly beauty of one of his knives. She wonders, gracelessly, if she has the courage to choose a lover's death.
Lady, come from that nest
Of death, contagion, and unnatural
sleep:
A greater power than we can contradict
Hath thwarted our
intents.
There is no Paradise for suicides. God is cruel, as cruel as the blade she holds unsheathed, as cruel as a thousand bullets. The handle pricks her hand like thorn and she lets it fall onto the sheets.
...Yet folllow you I would, under thy lady's dark sails, to the edge of oblivion. There content would I perish without grace, or hope of salvation...
Words spoken long ago. An empty promise? Or a vision? Did the author see into her future and despair?
Was she capable of such? Perhaps it was simpler, long ago. To sacrifice your own life for the unknown. For the future.
For love.
The jukebox's timeless voice dies away.
She slides one finger over the delicate handle, and sighs away her grief.
She sleeps again.
Somewhere, a windchime mutters, dancing in ethereal twirls at his passing. A gloved finger smoothes over her parted lips, light as the touch of essence itself.
He turns his eyes to the naked blade.
This sight of death is as a bell, that warns my old age to a sepulchre.
She does not stir. Despair's pale shadow wings above her with moth-fire eyes.
For a moment he contemplates. The sun stirs, far to the east. A new world dawns, for those with the eyes to behold.
But she is undisturbed.
When she wakes….
But not yet.
Not yet.
The quotes in italics are from Romeo and Juliet, Act V.
Sym...bo...lis...m!
I didn't even notice that until just then, either.
"Yet follow you I would, under thy lady's dark sails, to the edge of oblivion. There content would I perish without grace, or hope of salvation."
That quote is mine and is part of a sonnet I wrote called "Lament".
Please let me know what you thought.
Taluliaka
