stl: bush, 'comedown,' 'glycerine'
She slipped beneath the scalding water, drowning herself in the liquid heat.
In her sleepless dreaming, she saw his face as perfectly flawed as it had been the day they met. That day, the gloriously warm day that it had been, everything she had known and believed so thoroughly in fell to pieces-- she was not, did not have to be, alone. Bemused at her disheveled state, he had extended his hand and assisted her out of the cavern she had taken refuge in. In that moment, when her fear and trepidation had suddenly vanished, she realized that she could never live a moment without his predator eyes, his keen understanding of her every move.
Bliss.
That's what their love had been-- fifty years of bliss. Fifty years of something more real to her than the ground beneath her feet, the sky above her head. It had taken her years to learn how to move around him, how to navigate his extreme emotional states, but she had mastered it, come to love him for the ever wavering fault lines between love and hate, need and disgust. No one, not in her human life or in this afterlife, had touched her soul the way he did. No one sent the thrill of new love running through her the way a solitary glance and a slow smile from his lips could. For fifty years, she had lived in a perpetual state of euphoria.
In one swift, rash judgment, she had tumbled from her castle in the sky.
That castle, built on the hopes and dreams of words like 'forever,' 'eternity' and 'infinity,' burned to ashes in the sweltering night. She had been evicted from her throne, banished to Hell to walk on cinders, over glass, despair as far as the eye could see. The days had blurred together, smatterings of dark and light punctuated by the ticking of the clock; time was now rendered irrelevant to her conscious mind. She withdrew into herself, into her memories and daydreams. The loss was palpable-- a fresh, stinging wound that opened itself over and over again, giving her no reprieve.
The searing heat captured by porcelain granted her the only peace she had come to know.
It felt so close to the fire.
It felt so like the heat of his arms.
In this space, he was with her again.