algid

I awoke suddenly and caught a rush from the life in my veins and the inertia in the air. My senses were restless. I looked around, my eyes slowly adjusting to the light infiltrating the room through the cracked bathroom door; they have become more accustomed to the dark. He lay still beside me, undisturbed by my movement. It was too hot in the room and it was raining outside, each drop hitting the window with an inviting resonance. Outside on the front porch I lit a cigarette, pulling hard to slow my breathing and calm my nerves and enjoyed the cool mist from the rain, wet on my hot skin. I ground the end of the finished cigarette into the cement floor of the porch, causing another blackened spot among an amorphous group of many. Looking at them, I realized they represented all I had been doing lately, which was nothing important; they were merely ashes, the remnants of a cremated relationship.
He used to sit here with me, sharing cigarettes and banter about things we knew nothing about in lofty tones that defined our youth. He always knew a little more than me and it showed, but he would always surrender a smile at my tenacity. That was all before the day was corrupted by the night, before the veil that enabled light conversation and laughter without cynicism was abruptly lifted. I pulled the elastic band of his boxers down and slowly ran my fingers over the raised lines on my right hip.
The word algid  had been burning behind my eyelids every time I closed them, so I had carved it carefully into my skin to make it stop. Now, my fingertips reveled in skimming over the smooth scars, tracing the graceful loops of the a and the  l  and the g-i-d , bone white against my tan skin and the blackness of the night. I fixated on the alluring symmetry of the word itself, as it flowed in immaculate script across my body. I lit another cigarette and yielded to my thoughts, allowing them to traipse through my memories. The cold emptiness of the front porch weighed heavily on me and although I was getting used to it, I longed for before. Before, when he would sit across from me and talk, or just sit comfortably in a silence that communicated the type of mutual understanding far too complex for words. Before he lost sight of the moment and how things were, shifting his focus to the future and how things should be.
Now, the silence between us only accentuated that we had nothing more to say, or at least nothing that could navigate the distance and neutralize the detachment and guardedness; sturdy fortifications in the abandon of the void that had been left behind and although I was getting used to it, I longed for before. Before I spent my nights alone, even in his company, trying to keep the big sadness at bay. The sound of distant sirens pulled me back to the cold porch. The rain had stopped. The road leading directly away from the house was illuminated with a soft glow, refracted through the countless spheres of water that decorated every surface. Fresh rain clung to the leaves and the sticky pavement and hung still in the air, suspended in this particular moment in which the world slowed its spinning and everything faded from existence except the mist and the leaves and the road. The road, saturated by the darkness, faded into an inviting obscurity from which something familiar beckoned me. Algid seared in my skin, the scars smoldering white hot, and I understood that this one moment was the only chance I would have to submit to the intense magnetism of the thing waiting in the unknown down the road, and to make the scar stop burning.
He stirred in his sleep, sensing the significance of the past few minutes and rolled in to the empty depression on my side of the bed. He walked slowly though the house we shared, subliminally aware that something was different. Opening the door to the front porch, he turned on the light and glanced around.

All he could see was the faint outline of her back, silhouetted against the road, the darkness engulfing her tiny, upright frame, the chair on the porch still gently rocking.