...to meet the emptiness of the chamber around...24augosto...

Morello 'White Don Quixote'

I dream of you, to wake: would that I might, Dream of you and not wake but slumber on - Monna Innominata, Christina Rossetti, 1881

The ocean's breeze carried with it the sounds of lovers laughing. They laughed in little snippets that caught up in tendrils of air, shifting up and about. I could not make them out, this part of the shore was dark. Where only moments ago I could make shadows shifting in the darkening air, I saw only dark. The horizon before me blocked in only two shades. I could barely make out the light of a boat as it moved deeper into the wet air beyond. Diffused and singular, it went out like a dying ember.

The sand was warm just inches under the top-most layer. I fell back onto the ball of my hoodie, arms outstretched.

Stars were impossible to see here. There was only the red glow of light from tungsten. It reached outward and up, but never allowed for the dark of sky to be charitable and allow us to see stars again. I would have to drive 20 miles out to see anything.

My phone lay on my chest. I had just deleted the last thread of texts. It didn't make it that much better - I just knew it was right. Those moments were lost to the ether. I looked blankly at my phone. The wallpaper was the last remnants of light to my right - as it emblazoned the thousand lights of San Pedro, well off in the distance.

"What could I do?" Nothing seemed to be the cast of the chasm immediately in front of me, it's as if I didn't see it. Nothing. The grand question came to me then, after all the torment, the lost sleep, the self-loathing that burned itself into my face, all of the buckets of shit. It was the question that I asked to myself and I was embarrassed to hear it, to entertain it. It carried with it more truth than the other thousand questions that came before.

"What about me?"

I hope that beyond that insipid feeling my heart carries you in it because of all that was laid bare before. The heart cannot be tricked or cajoled for the breadth and heights of ecstatic wont. It just was. It sought you out when I did not ask, even now. I don't try. It comes to me like a wash of an unexpected breeze. And, always, always to you. Maybe not like the epic strain of the orchestra at the conclusion of a row, but still there like the easy pull of a chord along a violin - are either not more fulfilling than the other?

"You." "You." "You: not me." I don't know as I collapsed deeper into my sullenness. This is what it is. A year's gone by. And still this remains. I only picture a raised glass in a room of the most baroque opulence, but the goblet, elaborate and refined and lovingly made as it is, meets only the emptiness of the chamber around it.