Segment 8

         To where? Where is this? Where are you? I’m just wandering around the rooms of a house and it’s the house of your life, I’m walking from room to room but the whole place is empty because you’re not there. The air reeks of you, I hear echoes of footsteps down the hallways and it’s you. And you’re not there. I can touch the walls and feel the marks woven by fingerprints and it’s yours but that’s all that’s left of you. Just signs. I’m wandering around the house and you’re not there and nobody knows where you went. And it’s snowing outside, I can see it through the windows and the door, the door downstairs is wide open and I think you’ve gone out into the snow and I want to follow you but there’s a blizzard outside and all your footprints are covered, if they were ever there. I’m standing at the entrance and I’m staring out into the wastes but there’s nothing to see beyond a white haze. I don’t know where it leads and I can’t see where you’ve gone. I’m shouting your name in the dark, hoping that someone hears, hoping to hear your voice, just one more time. Another word, that’s all. I can’t take this, I can’t handle any more of it, being in this empty place, where the scent of you is fading with every passing second, going from room to room and realizing that it hardly takes any time to walk from one end to the other. That’s all we have. Just a collection of moments. It breaks me, somewhere that I can’t admit. I’m sagging against the doorframe and it’s hardly holding me up. What I have of you barely clings when faced with the wind. I want to call out for you again but I just don’t have the energy. All I have is the cold and the chill and the memory of what it was like to be warm, a long time ago.
         There’s shapes sideways to my vision. It’s a trick of the notlight. I don’t know where else to go. All at once, the wind shifts direction, drenching my eyes in blinding whiteness and I don’t see anything at all, leaving without finding you, without ever finding out where I had been.