Nocticadia

by Keri Lake

It happened sometimes. Something would trigger thoughts, and those thoughts had me slipping into the most horrific memory of my life. One that never failed to pull me under so deep that I lost sight of my own reality.

Trauma could do shitty things to a person’s head, after all.

“What separates monsters from good men is only a matter of perspective.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil.

“That is the tragedy of women, isn’t it? We deny ourselves beauty for the sake of misleading men.”

The dead teach the living.

“Passions are useless, if we pursue them for others. They become obligations. Undesirable.”

I didn’t want to wash him off me yet. A part of me hoped his essence would seep beneath my skin.

That, maybe, he’d feel the same shiver of need as I did, if I kept a part of him inside of me. What a sickening thought.

My body mourned her.

She was the warmth of the sun on a cold and rotting corpse. The first breath after a lifetime of death.

He was moody, like rainy days and bitter coffee.

Could I have known another soul so intimately as in that moment, with the two of us wound so tightly together?

I knew fate and the world didn’t give so freely. It lured us on a siren’s call and pulled us to the inevitable depths of pain that followed.

The problem was, there was too much at once, so much that I couldn’t feel anything, at all.

“Devryck, I …. You love her?” I didn’t answer her. I hadn’t said those words to Lilia, so why she thought she deserved to know first was beyond my scope of giving a fuck.

I’d carry that information to the grave on the promise that Lilia and I would reunite in the afterlife.

Half my soul staring back at me like a dark reflection in the mirror.

I hadn’t realized how much I’d yearned for that, how much I’d needed that level of closeness without actual sex.

“That I would kill for you without a beat of hesitation, or remorse. And yet, at the same time, I could be reduced to nothing more than a pile of ash without you.

“I have lived a lifetime in death–a cold existence in an endless void. Never feeling. Never knowing the warmth of touch. Every unfulfilling breath a suffocating reminder of how hollow I’d become. It wasn’t until you came along and cast the first ray of light that I felt a pulse of life.

My dark sea. The mystifying depths that both captivated and terrified me.

I’d come to learn that at the heart of life was suffering, and pain was an inevitable consequence of love.

Sometimes, the pain was too much to bear. But sometimes it felt good, because it meant that I was capable of feeling something.