golden fervour

Through the glass I watch them, all bright smiles and shaky photos from a party, anchored with drinks that change colour every time I close my eyes. From the outside I watch the whole ugly scene and forget the old uniform. It’s a new skin now; armoured like a king, angry like a soldier. Let the old story out from where it was tightly bound, those dirty blank scraps with bleeding colours. Watch me scrub those years off like the glitter under an old friend’s tired eyes. Pour it all away like the wine dye from my wet hair down the sink.

They say that our happy criminals drank the last bottle of amnesia but I remember exactly how I came to be here with the last of us, looking on every street corner for that same hint of fuschia. I don’t like fuchsia. I never did. And I can’t bear the jasmine perfume and I abhor all the pretty things that come together to make up that dying painting, this mess of a story, one damned wreck of a fantasy. Outside the glass I stay protected, safe from the ending we never got to.

The party continues for the rest of a lifetime and still I stare at the people I once knew. Not criminals, hardly sinners, but the toxins remain all the same.

How do they breathe there? Why do they still not see me?

They were places that I knew like the organs in my body. Their eyes were gems on the rings I wore every day. Now I watch as they live on under the fireworks while we hide in the old opal caves below, scarred from where the memories ripped gashes into our silence. Spare a thought, if you can, for the unmarked grave at the wedding, one for the silent flower in the weed bed. One for the lone person left outside the interrogation room.

On some days there is a distant drumming from the outside, memories spiralling across the room like architects. The old spirits try to catch us but all we have are the old empty pages and blood like the juice from a lime, burning everything it passes through. And it’s burning all right, it’s burning you like fire. You half want to drink it just to have it done with. You have to leave it alone to dry. In the meantime we sew up every missing person’s badge and keep the needles for fingernails, poking holes in every new tale we see.

The music keeps playing for them as I look over the old files, thighs pasted to a cold metal chair. Flashes of old photographs move right through my bare ribcage and out through the space where my lungs used to be. But organs aside, I remember them still, badges pinned to our chests and the songs we sang once the quest was over. If I close my eyes I see us still, the kids jumping off the balcony into the unknown. But it was pointless going. It was meaningless staying. And now we’re just waiting; waiting. Waiting for the rest of the world to jump too.

(They all lived happily ever after.

All of them in their world, and all of us in ours.)

Wouldn’t you want them to be happy? No, and maybe that makes me the bad guy. I could watch the whole story from the other side of the glass if it didn’t make me sick.

I could shower for the next ten years and still not be able to scrape that summer out of my skin the way you did.

[Image: A Sri Lankan lotus flower. Source: Dani Relbyn. Used with permission.]