The Prompt Project

His name was a song that, once heard for the first time, played on my lips constantly. A melody I'd thought held more than just a magic to it.

To me, it sang of forever. It sang of forever in that way that children talk about life and love.

"Forever and ever, and ever, Mommy! That's how long you're gonna live! That's how long I'll love you!"

Whimsical and fantastic - he was a dream.Just a dream and nothing more, it seems. He was a fanciful thing that threw itself into my home uninvited. And I was just a gracious hostess, serving brownies and milk on request.

So I guess it really was forever that we were together. It sure as hell felt like it. It was forever in only a year - an eternity spent with gently intertwined hands that slowly hardened their grip. Bliss turned black. A "love" soured.

He talked me into the sunrise and I took his hand. I guess that means I started it, then. I ignited the fuse. I drove us into the fog - and illusion took over afterwards. He smiled, and I tightened my hold on him. That was it. The time when that strange feeling blossomed in my stomach, as if I'd somehow swallowed Spring.

In my gut were planted the seeds of Eros, and out of them grew roses of sweet destruction. They sprouted up and into my heart, wrapping tender petals around pulsing ventricles and arteries; but, most importantly, the beating muscle itself.

And what could I do about it, as he sang softly in my ear, an insistent, dark rumbling? What else could I do but listen and sway to his deceptive song? Think of his name; listen to its music?

Why are the lies of such affection so sweet?

Why do we fall so easily but land so hard when it's all over?

I thought it was love. True love. The kind of love that sews a heart to completion with the needle of lifetimes lived together and apart.

But it wasn't. It really wasn't. We loved each other because of the possibilities we saw in each other; not the realities that were. We were both greedy, fanciful things; searching for something that only came to us after we stopped looking. We were both dreams waiting to crash into the perfect ideal of wakefulness.

And we didn't figure it out - I didn't figure it out - until I let go of that hand, he stopped smiling, and the song in his name finally ended....