THE LONG WAY HOME

The fingers move slowly. The beautiful long fingers that you wrapped around my face when made love and lay intertwined with each other on the white sheets in a state of daze that kept us so hooked on to each other, inexplicable, torturously pleasurable.

“I am thinking about you every single moment of every single day. And I want to come back. For every lovely song that you sang to encourage me when I struggled with gutless spineless craven men and women spattered shamelessly around the world undeservedly.”

In the morning yesterday, you had seen me standing there at the door. Everything that you had wanted to fight about and argue over escaped your body now in slow vapors and those following moments will be etched in my memory for every single day of my remaining life. And I know they were etched in whatever was left of yours.

“…Amazed at why a filthy piece of waste like me would find someone so wholesomely wonderful and so selflessly magnificent. Why you would go on being perfectly accepting of everything that I hate myself for.”

As you lie down now, your face is calm like how I always remembered it during those days in the foreign country when you haunted me with your smiles and voices, with your love which refused to die in my heart, which chased me everywhere.

“I know I left you when you most needed me. I betrayed every single shred of your holy faith and devotion, bared my true self and left you to rot and suffer in indignity. But I know you will let me come back if I promise that this time I will set everything alright. But I know you will let me come back even if I do not promise anything.”

I look at your eyes, wide open, staring at the ceiling. You had given up the struggle mysteriously when a strange tranquil quiet had run over your face and I had to avoid your eyes and look at the ceiling as I had tightened the edge of your dress more and more around your delicate neck.

“But this time I am making promises that I will keep. You are too pure for this world, too chaste. I have to come back because I cannot leave you alone in this contaminated world with your innocence. And I cannot live here knowing that you exist in this world somewhere with your innocence and purity.”

This world had to remain insincere and thankless for me, my love. But… not for you. I wanted to destroy all crumbs of goodness in this world so that I could go on with my deceit without any remorse. Wouldn’t you have helped me in ridding myself of the shackles that bound me? Even if I told you that those shackles were you?

“So let me come back this one time and lay to rest all those forces that have been holding us back from where we both want to go, where we both deserve to go. Let us set our souls free.”

So now as you lie in front of me with your beautiful fingers and your delicate neck, I know I was right in wanting to come back to you, in taking this long way home. I could never go on otherwise.


Word Count: 550