A Postscript Of Us by A. Hasach
P.S: I dreamt of you last night. You said you loved me, and I asked whether you knew when I had last moved.
Your brows lifted to contort your face with a quizzical gleam, those brown eyes winking like burning stars plucked from the sky and scattered across death-fed soil. Have they always looked so sharp and endless, or did you finally get the Lasik to stop your squinting?
Perhaps I remember the exact shade of brown they were in a play of the waning moon’s light because this was a vision dream, and your hair spilled like molten chocolate over your shoulders and back, longer than it had been when I last saw you. The same brown — your eyes and your hair — carved from a forbidden center of the earth.
You are the center of my earth.
Nevertheless, I digress.
I asked, and your gaze kept me rooted to where I sat with my feet tucked in my hands on something that felt like wet sand. It slid between my toes and scraped my skin raw, cool and warm at once. Water lapped in the distance. A symphony of waves crashing against a shore lulling my mind. All I could smell was you the salt-laden midnight breeze.
Two years. Maybe three?
You moved as if to speak, and then your teeth were grazing my ear like you weren’t allowed to.
Three, then. I haven’t moved in three years because I am sick.
It was a truth I would have never confessed to a soul.
But this was you. Moonlight softening your face until my fingers were suddenly cold and aching to feel its warmth turning the angles of your face horrendously wrong, crooked and pasty. You were, are, harmless.
My mind and my body are sick with a melancholy so powerful it hurts to breathe.
In that moment, I felt it again.
There is a gaping hole in my chest that my scorching heart struggles to fill. It shrinks, wrinkles forming on the knot of tissues surrounding the weakening muscle, and threatens to sink into my flesh, absolving itself of the duty to sustain me and the melancholy rooted so deeply within that it has become me.
I lay in my bed curled into myself like a newborn trying to return to the womb for three years and more. Sick is the air in my lungs and the water in my veins and the deafening echo in my brain. I cannot love you with a sick heart and tired soul that will wreck your being until it somewhat resembles the shell I have become.
I closed my eyes then. Your lips descended on mine and the wetness of the ocean pervaded my senses.
Maybe it was you.
It was you. The warmth of your mouth felt like the promise of a future and an exchange of elemental energy. You taking away my pain and filling me with light until I couldn’t tell where my body ended and yours began. Where my past ended and your present began.
We were mirrors, then. You and I were just me
I love you.
I hope you don’t mistake this for a declaration of love.
“I trashed this piece because it was based on a prompt that made me think too deeply and feel too much. This is an intimate reflection of a character that came from beyond me - a conversation between the present and past self, tender and inquisitive and warm and wrong - and I didn't feel comfortable putting this visceral note out into the world.”
A. Hasach (@a_hasach) is an eighteen-year-old writer from India, soon pursuing an undergraduate degree in English. Her work has appeared in Pressfuls Digipress, Inertia Teen, and other publications.