A Thousand Times

She felt it before he even looked up at her.

It crawled through her skin like a thousand tiny beetles; thirsty, rushing to gorge on the sweet nectar that seeped from the core of her being. The nectar was for him, for those long, elegant hands that used to spiral softly down her breasts to the warm, pulsing threshold promising danger and beauty. It had always been for him, since that first day he swallowed her with his deep, inky eyes. His eyes had smiled a brilliant smile in her direction that abruptly pulled her into a swirl of laughing, loving, giving.

Loving.

They had loved. Yes, he had loved her desperately once. He’d whisper this secret to the stars as they writhed and quaked underneath the night sky. Those nights, she was enchanted by the way the moonlight seemed to caress his skin and send small beams of silver radiance through his fingertips. As he kissed her skin, he’d tell her the secrets of the world; promise her the vast unknown while he trembled inside her. A sigh of her name would linger in the atmosphere, the wind slowly rocking it back and forth as they reached a beautiful oblivion.

But that was then. The wind had let her name drift, forgotten, away from that sacred place where he had once loved her.

“I don’t love you anymore.” He spoke this evenly, without a hitch in breathe or even a tiny sigh.

“I know,” she murmured, more to herself than to him.

         She finally lifted her head and dared a glance into those beautiful, fierce, rainwater eyes. A tiny gasp escaped her lips. They were empty. Mere shells of the eyes of the boy she lived for. She grabbed his face and searched desperately for even the slightest glimmer of familiarity. Her fingernails tore at his olive skin, small half moons of blood pooling around his eyes.

         “Fuck you.” The utterance crackled like lightning. His body stood rigid and his eyes still. She would never find what she was looking for and it was all she could say. He’d erased his love completely; thrown it away with her name, to be just a memory of a thing. He would never remember that love, just a girl who’d tore at his face with her heart splayed like an open book.

         “I don’t love you anymore.”

         Fists curled into angry red balls of hatred, she hurled herself at his chest, pounding on like war drums. Now she just needed to see anything flicker in those hypnotizing eyes; she needed there to be life, a spark, anything to make him human again. Inside her, a tumultuous battle waged between rage and pain. As she beat his shoulders, legs and face, her own legs were threatening to give. They were bowing under the weight of a tremendous, bloated heart; bloated from the now bittersweet nectar he would no longer drink. The ardor he shunned, would no longer accept.

         She slumped, giving up, the warrior quelled. He stood there like a pillar, stony and unmoving, blank eyes staring through her ghost of a form, into nothingness. With a shiver and a parting of swollen, fleshy lips, she slowly relieved her overstuffed heart onto the world, onto him.

         “I love you. I love you. I love you. A thousand times I love you.”

         For a moment, the words hung there, suspended in the air like tiny frozen raindrops; dazzling little diamonds stuck glittering in the space between them, sparkling for no one. Then the wind lifted the diamonds up in through the trees, whirling them around and around to another place, for another time, along with her name and his love. She watched her diamonds float away, hoping to see them again some day with a lover to tuck them away in a precious velvet box and admire their magnificence everyday.

         “I don’t love you anymore.”

         With these words, her pillar finally moved. His limbs sprinkled dry dust and rocks as he turned and walked away from her forever. His long, dark shadow never hesitated, his flinty head never shifted in the slightest, and his cold eyes stared straight ahead, that moment of his life already gone from his recollections. She, whose love never was, was just that: a she and nothing more, a lucky copper penny dropped to the floor, overlooked and tails-side up.

         She stood there idly, watching his back as he left her memory behind, half expecting enormous feathery white wings to tear through his skin and him to take off into the cold autumn dusk. With him, she threw the leftovers of what could have made her drown in a salty ache for the next few decades. Her soul bore a fresh scar and with it the remembrances of what was.

         “A thousand times I’ve loved you. A thousand more, I will not.”