Dying Poet

Her hands trembled as she attempted, once more, to say everything she longed to say, without actually saying it. Her eyes stung with tears as her traitorous mind went blank yet again. Tried as she might, the words refused to come; she’d lost her inspiration.
Love was her passion, and it had smoldered out. With a sigh of resignation, she closed her beloved notebook, setting it aside gently next to a small pile of crumpled parchment. She lay her pen down, as she would not be requiring it any longer.
As her dark hair fell across her pale, stone-cold features, the sky outside her window faded into a dull grey, rain splattering the shattered glass of the splintered windowpane. Shadows stretched across the blood-red carpeting of her tiny room, the ink of her pen bursting forth and trailing in rivers across the remaining shreds of light, having fallen victim to the darkness’ demands. She failed to notice in her resoluteness, nor did she look up. Her eyes, trained on the antique floor, were now dead, glassed over with the remnants of ever-collapsing hope. The sapphire depths, once sparkling like oceans in the palest moonlight, were now as solid as the winter lakes.
Resting her weighted head upon an upraised knee, her hair tumbling like a current over quivering legs, she felt the beginning of a timeless cry rise up within her throat; suffocating, yet impossible to stop. The cry reached her eyes, blazing with a newer, yet drearier light than before, and just as suddenly as her eyes went dead, they returned to life, the sapphire painting out a twisted realm of bottomless dreams; sadness, grief, and above all, loss. The endless world of painful realities burned like rekindled fires within the coldest, most sinister night.
Torment, like that of caged panthers and chained rebels, screamed like the wails of a hurling ocean in the midst of a battling storm. Music pounded, and she lost herself within another’s truth; a dreamer, a worshipper of lyrics. Love was her passion, and it had smoldered into nothing; a memory. A new fury was found within the depths of her broken, tattered soul: the heat of music. Here, it drowned out the shame and critical masquerades; here, she continued to live. This was night, the eternal sunset. Dusk’s immortal glory. Silently gathering, the shadows raged closer, their claws shredding the worn carpeting and leaving rivers of ink in their wake. Closer, closer, she was swallowed in fragments, as glass has a powerful tendency to cut. Helpless, as a lost ship in the presence of Lorelei, she, too, fell victim to the strengthening shadows.
But before her eyes froze into the winter lakes of which one could never hope to break free, she grasped her quill in a firm, lively grip, tore open her notebook, and left scribbled upon its pages… “Save Me”. Gone was the dying poet.