He Still Lingers.

He Still Lingers.

I sit down staring at the door. It is not locked but I feel locked out of this world. Out of the place where happiness and contentment lie. I cannot reach out to anything; I am floating out to sea. Don't you see how much I need you? I do not know how I have survived so long. You left me and it was years I endured. Insanity, rejection and finally recognising my own son. But never did I find acceptance. Never did I find a path away from grief. There is no alternative when true love has gone. Little Dante knows nothing and is the child of a ghost. He is not my son, I cannot look at him. How can he be a part of me when I feel I am not even real? An empty shell of a man who bears the scars of the town. Who also holds shards in his body that will never heal, the touch of love that left him breathless, and whom is strangled now that love is gone. Now that she is gone. He is a hanged man, he is a no man. He never stood a chance.

I have not returned back to the town where we were born. I cannot bear the memories. The morgue holds so much within its walls, save for corpses and blood. Her name, her name. It brands me. She is beneath my blood, sewn into my skin, entwined into my being. She cannot be purged. Held like a stillborn babe, I keel over with failing gasps of life. Dante!- Leave me alone, let me stew in my grief until death claims me. Gratefully I would fall out of the door of life through the walls of the afterlife, where she waits for me. She must linger there, for how else could she torment my every thought? She wants me to find her, find her beyond the realms that my mortality can reach. Help me to run through the portal to where I can see her face. Oh my beautiful love, why did you leave me? Violet, I worship your memory.

Infatuated. I am deflated. There is no breath left to puff the life back into me. I relive the moment every night in my sleep. It grips me like the hand of winter and chills my core. Her eyes so vacant, her blood still seeping. Oh the fear! That dread so terrible it felt like I had fell through the street into an abyss. My scream burst through my lips and scored my larynx. It could not be contained. In that instant I felt a bullet shot through me. If my heart could shriek in pain I felt it do so. My world collapsed inwards and devoured me, the lives of the others around me vanished from my sight. I saw nothing else apart from her, but the light in her eyes was gone! The glow in her ivory cheeks was not visible. I could not feel her breath, I could not touch her skin, I could not hear her heartbeat!

I ran to her with eyes watching me. I wanted to hold her but they wondered why. I wanted to shake her and force the life back into her but they would not let me. They wondered why I cried out her name over and over as if in my deranged mind I thought she might just get up from her fall. Dust down her corpse and lift her from the floor like I have done so many times before. But they would not let me! Violet, you cannot imagine the horror. You cannot understand the crippling terror of realising that you were not going to be with me! If I had had a gun with me I would have blown my brains out the second I knew you had left me. But it is harder now to summon the courage to put it to an end so violently when there is prominent evidence of life all around me,  taunting me. That night there was only death. They would not let me lie forever with you.