love

The Blind Man’s Return

/ simonsalento / Leave a comment

He walked into the public bar of the Blind Man’s Return and looked around, looking no one in the face.

She saw him first but he spoke first.
Hallo, princess.

She fluttered a little when he spoke but not to show.
Hallo. It’s been a long time.

Too long, princess.

You used to say I was your princess.

And you was. You could still be, princess.

No, those days are past now. Now you just call me princess, just like everybody else. But I was your princess once. Remember that and never deny it.
She seemed to be holding back tears.

He nodded slowly, once, and then the man behind him felled him with a cosh.

Later, alone, she cried for when she had been his princess.

I should have regretted less

/ simonsalento / Leave a comment

I should have written a love letter, I should have written a love song. I should have said how my heart broke of happiness, how it sang with a song of a knife on crystal glass and then broke.

I should have done more; I should have regretted less. I should have said what I thought, said what I saw, the fireworks shooting and the stars falling across the sky, the colours when I closed my eyes and was elsewhere.

I should have gloried in the weathers, the snow that was you, the rain that was you, the low dark clouds that would split and break and split away to show the blue light shining through.

I should have been less thoughtless, I should have done more and regretted less.

So I decided.

The sound of electronic paper

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The sound of electronic paper crumpling. She wrote down her thoughts and memories, the beautiful and the false, and then electronically tore them up, the lack of gravity spinning them into spirals of ice crystals, of pixels, of flashing remembrances of things that had never happened. In the dark they flashed and sparkled and spun and winked and disappeared in the dark again.

“All the beauty is all for you.” She always ended her letters in the same way. “All the beauty.” “All for you.” She still thought of them as letters though they didn’t exist outside her head, inside the clouds.

It had been so long since she’d written, so long. She imagined his eyelid fluttering at the thought, at the thought that she might again, soon, at the thought that she might never. And then there was stillness.

Bar the sound of electronic paper crumpling.