The Funeral Of A Dress

Somewhere between the corner of your eyes and the corner of your lips, my love for you was gone. Your expression did not change, your smile was still warm, and I knew then you did not know. Was I ready to tell you or was I to leave my deception by the chair for your to discover after I was gone?

Making love must be a little like death, for your face said content; a discarded black dress on the edge of your bed is what I wore to your funeral. But it wasn’t your funeral, even though the ravens in my mind wouldn’t stop cawing. It was still a funeral, and that dress must have been the gallows on which my love hung itself. All in the space of a moment, one snap, like the cracking of a twig under my foot, and it was gone, taking with it the butterflies, the blushes, the clandestine meetings.

With a long drawn sigh of inevitable loss, I picked up the dress, black satin still soft, slippery folds to drape slippery folds. My arms felt heavy as I lifted it up and let it drop to my shoulders. I glanced to see that your smile had not wavered, and I find myself searching, thinking was it possible for yearnings to die like that, like a train that disappeared midway on the tracks? Were my emotions hiding under your white pillow with the green flowers on its case? Were they in the steam rising from the kettle, where tea had been brewing for a while, forgotten because we had other things on our minds? Had they been washed down the drain? Or did they fly out the window?

The window. Near the window you kept mirror, propped up by a crooked nail. It was the size of a photograph taken in old fashioned studios, five inches by seven inches. The mercury was beginning to corrode, brown patches appeared beneath. Golden light was filtering through curtains that matched your pillow case, blocked on one side by a creaking bookshelf. As I brushed my hair, you nuzzled close and I saw a part of your face in that  mirror – the three moles under your right eye, like stars in a sparse constellation. I thought of all the times I’d touched them with the tip of my thumb and I wondered why I pulled away from them now. There was a crack in the corner of the mirror. Did my love escape through it? Or through those brown patches where the mirror forgot to reflect?

I’m leaving, I announced, my voice void of thought and feeling. Bye, you said, your smile unaware that I meant forever. Then I was out your door, the satin strangling a being inside me – a being that once was loud and refused to be silenced, now pliant, willing to die. Fitting that I was wearing black, this satin to be burnt and buried. Buried in the ground as I wondered, where had my love gone. Beyond the door of your home was a graveyard – a surreal kingdom where this burden drowned me while its threads lifted me. The graveyard where I buried this dress that had tainted my skin.

My skin. With the dress. In this graveyard. With my love, those butterflies, those blushes, those clandestine meetings.

#fiction #freewrite #freeverse #streamofconsciousness #prose

Originally published on my blog.