Theodora

Hamish had never known his fingers could become so numb without the cold. He never knew his heart could feel like a deflated balloon, burst from the prickle that once clung to his rose. He traced the echo of her breast, the forgotten particles of her thighs and the ghost of her shoulders. He touched her skin so delicately for she was his rose and her petals fell easily, as he had fatally learnt before. But all that remained were her petals, dry and crumbling like autumn leaves. He had found himself lost in her rusty eyes so often that much of his soul had floated between the gold specks, forever trapped in her pupils. He lay beneath his sheets at midnight and understood that she too were laying beneath sheets but no longer beside him, no longer buried in his cocoon of body and love. Her hair did not tangle around his fingers and her voice no longer complained of his weary body unable to get out of bed. Instead, Hamish imagined that her rosy soul was beside him and so he uttered his words like a birds song, ‘I love you’, and hoped that the night would carry them away to her ears and her dreams, tucked beneath the safety of a home that was foreign to her.