Silvertone
Silver strings in gray dreams are the only way I’m still connected to you.
Spindly bare branches, train tunnels to nowhere, half-crumbling stone bridges and peeling green paint reminds me of you. So does the taste of dark chocolate, dirt under my nails, the sound of raindrops meeting pond water. I see you in warped reflections in storefront windows, in cracked antique mannequins, in white hoodies and silver rings.
The smallest state feels a hell of a lot smaller since you left. Some days, I feel a hell of a lot smaller too, as does my life, my body, my soul, and my dreams. All this gray trickling water sings your name, it seems, because even now you’re the only thing that feels real. But I’m not sure you ever were.
In my mind, you live somewhere out West, where you’re jarred by thunder booming across the plains and not sirens dominating the block. Your two-story yellow farmhouse has a meandering driveway, a rocking chair on the porch, and terrible lighting inside. You live in a romanticist’s town, the kind whose beauty melts newcomers’ hearts. Visitors swoon and gawk, but everyone’s just passing through.
At night you make fires in a circle of stones behind your house. You wander back, sometimes, to the night we watched sparks interminge with stars until pulsing coals replaced flame, and the cold settled into our bones like a skipping stone into the Seekonk.
In the bathroom mirror you admire the tattoo on your stomach, the birth mark on your right pec, the small scar through your left eyebrow. In dreams you mingle with me, like sparks with stars, like gnats on white flowers, like the end with the all-too delicate middle. My little lilac. In this fiction, you’re as alone as I feel these days. But I know you’re actually content with the solace. Small towns house smaller dreams, but also smaller fears, fewer choices, simpler lives. It figures that you’ve given into their appeal.
My palm still feels naked without your hand in it.
Occasionally, on quiet window-pane mornings, in soft smiling faces, atop the edge of a distant horizon, I wonder at how much distance lies between the two of us.
The two of us. Our story once felt so ultimate, now it feels like the insignificant end to a otherwise beautiful novella. I suppose some stories aren’t wrapped in velvet bows and gift wrap. Some wither, and end cold and bare. They don’t tell you that when you’re falling in love.
Some stories don’t end at all. And those are always the worst kind.
Your disparate death has brought you the peace you once found with me. But even with these acres of emptiness, endless mountain ranges, lake beaches, state borders and hundreds of nowhere-towns that lie between us, you’ll always have a home with some part of me. And though I abandoned the life our love inspired, though I left you,
I’ve never let go.
And that, you’ll remember, is how I knew it would be on our first raucous love fest, our first walks through glittering gray forests, and, I’ll admit, our second kiss. That’s the price of loving with all your might, the consequence of permanence, the residue of a relationship worth living through. That’s the power of silver strings that stretch from my world into yours.
May your heaven be exactly the way you constructed it all those years ago. And may I, someday, stroll up to that little yellow house, rap twice on its oak front door and find your white hoodie and tousled blonde hair in all its glory, waiting for me to come back home.
AUTHOR: Mason Scurry
ARTIST: Jacqueline Zheng