• It is the end of a beginning; it is the beginning of an end. Her voice echoes through my mind, a siren’s song that contracts my muscles and drowns my senses in everything I have ever known. Memories of morning conversations, afternoon voyages, midnight arguments, coffee-laced kisses, and mesmerizing touches run rampantly through my eternal home movie theatre. Her name is bliss. Her name is beauty. Her name is amazement. Her name is perfection. Her name is forever. Her name is never, and she was the love of my life.

    Her silence is like a steel rod, carelessly pounding at the fiber of my being and snapping every tendon in my fragile body. The previous night’s dream, so real, so vividly perfect, begins to wither away in a mass of dull grays and blacks. Beads of sweat creep without purpose down my brow. As her eyes catch mine, I can see the truth beneath them. Yet her smile, her maddening smile reaches out to me, grasping firmly upon my sanity. That smile whispers hidden promises and an uncertain love, her eyes scream in guilt, shame, and pity, and still she continues to plead the fifth, holding firm to her voice as if her life would sift away upon any single word that she spoke. Lies are written so carefully across my own smile; I am all right; WE are all right; I am oblivious; so many lies coiled into our web of fantasy.

    Music bounds ceremoniously in the background. A throng of worked up, over excited, faceless fans cheer as the cheerleaders, garbed in bright miniskirts and flashy tank tops, flip and hurtle awkwardly. An announcer spits out a number of scores in the background. My incandescent beauty sits at my side, the epitome of divinity. At her other side I can make out her mother and sister giggling excitedly. The pride and elation are everywhere, stifling in its endless bounding. Surrounding my very figure is a black fog refusing the entry of any such cheer. The source of it all pulsates madly at the very core of this heart throbbing shadow, a macabre darkness steeling over my being, and yet I smile. A fool's smile indeed, as I appease her once again. This is day one of operation "relationship repair", and already the stench of failure claws at my threads.

    “Is everything all right?” I am finally able to whisper over the thundering crowd, hiding my every pain behind a light tone.

    “Everything is fine,” she retorts in a cheerful smile, reciting what would become her motto. She gingerly takes my hand in hers and flashes another half hearted crescent of lies. My stomach twists in a pit of despair. I am screaming her name from across this void, yet it is not my voice that she hears.

    It is now day three. We have been driving for five hours straight. Our destination is nowhere; our destination is everywhere. The sky falls in crystalline sheets, causing a complete transformation to the world around us. We are now driving through hell itself, quite changed from the fiery pits written in an average fantasy. Walls of ice flow carelessly past us, hissing in their anger, yet ever evasive. Our car rolls down the tarry path, inching closer and closer to a deathtrap, then teasingly jerking to safety at the last moment. The devil himself laughs mercilessly within the wind that whips and swirls against our steel encasing. A thin layer of metal and glass is all that separates myself from that icy hell. I would welcome it with open arms for just a moment’s worth of relief from this torturous silence!

    Within the back seat my shoulder presses tightly against hers as our proximity allows little room for comfort. Still, even in such a closed space, we could have been worlds apart; me, stuck forever in this horrid dome of ice, this hell on earth; her in an oblique world, based entirely upon arrogance and pride, the very core a bounding black heart. But oh, how I coiled around that black heart, the strands of my very being endlessly searching for a fragile opening! In those five hours, each of which could have easily counted for a year of my life, she had glanced upon my stoic figure just twice. Her angelic voice had reached my ears on numerous occasions, and yet just once directly for my attention. Still she ignores me, as if I am a mere stranger! I am nothing more than a hitchhiker, begging for any escape from the biting cold. I am a pathetic parasite, clinging to its host by a fragile strand.

    “Is everything all right?” I whisper ever so softly, leaning myself in her direction. My mind turns into putty as her scent wisps through my nostrils.

    “Everything is fine,” she replies with her now-patented smile. She subconsciously leans away from me. I close my eyes and grimace as the hole in my chest deepens.

    The days pass by, each one more miserable than the last. This eternal silence, this macabre torment threatens to bound my heart in its ever expanding noose. My breath has begun to catch in my chest. I feel like a seventy-year-old chain smoker, forever plagued with black lung. My figure has grown haggard and unkempt. Sleep has become all but impossible in this icy torrent. As day seven comes to a close, all hope has become completely lost. Her very presence has become but a distant memory, her soft, peach skin, sparkling azure irises -- a pair of shimmering orbs as deep as the ocean itself, gyrating like a massive vortex -- and soft, auburn hair forever evading my longing senses. We lay upon our cold grave dressed in sheets of rustic cloth and feathery pillows, backs staring each other down as we never will again.

    “Is everything all right?” I whisper, finally breaking the silence, a silence that will never be broken. I no longer attempt to hide the pain, now so eminent in my raspy voice.

    “Everything is fine,” she replies, her cheer breaking more easily than ever. Never have I heard the lie more boldly than I do at this moment. Never have I been so sure of my inevitable demise. The break in her cheer was not caused by any form of despair; she will never understand the wretched darkness that constantly enshrouds my mind; she will never feel the thrashing pain as she rips away my chest from the inside out; her voice is plagued with guilt, her eyes forever whispering in pity as they rest upon mine. Oh, the bliss Romeo must have felt! What tragedy in comparison? Had it ever been any different. Invariably not.

    With all hope lost for our relationship, the day of my departure has come. My suitcase is jam packed -- I hardly took the time to fold a single piece of clothing, but shoved everything into the case in forceful balls -- and my ticket is in hand. Her eyes graze across my frame one final time, all knowing, all seeing. The previous night, she had finally spoken the words that had been plastered upon her lips since Our beginning; there was to be no hope for our repair. We had become magnets with the same polar charge, pushing, pushing, forever pushing away from one another. I force myself not to let my own eyes wander across her visage for fear of becoming lost forever within those shimmering globes that threaten to encompass and drown me.

    Now here we stand, the final scene in this rollercoaster relationship coming to a close. A sense of complete apathy washes over me; my entire body has become numb. I cannot feel anything, I REFUSE to feel anything, for only then can I find shelter from the wretched cloud that looms around every corner, playing the ultimate villain to my sanity. In the background, cries of welcoming and goodbyes are muttered, the thick roar of an airplane shakes the ground, and all around me love flows like a waterfall; a couple whispers goodbye, their voices filled with hope as the thought of their eminent reunion plays within their minds; another couple cries out in exaltation, for their reunion has only just begun; and here we are at the bottom end of the spectrum, knowing their will never be another reunion. Somewhere in the distance I hear the numbers that signal our grand finale.

    “Is everything all right?” I whisper in a tone that could have been made by a man on his deathbed.

    “Everything is fine,” she replies, her own voice flooded in apathy. I dare one final look into her wondrous eyes. Within them I find a door that is and will forever be closed off to my own; a pain that grips at my heart and shakes my stoicism, sending convulsive shocks through my chest and abdomen. Yet in the distance, far from where I abide, a new song waits with unshakable patience, a new voice intent upon penetrating this god forsaken darkness. Hope glides through the air, pushing vicariously through every wall of tension. I turn my back upon what had once been my future, my everything. The last image I would ever see of her has already begun to fade as I follow Hope in her wake, never looking back.