It was an ugly sky, filled with colors of a burnt cigarette, stale and smoky, and it tasted reminiscently of bad dreams. He could feel its taste upon his tongue, like a wool sock, and it cloyed his head like wet burlap. He hated the undented space next to him like an ache he had never healed from. It was a bone-bruise, and it was part of the process of waking, realizing and remembering. He half the time wished he might wake up and realize it was a surgery, and he had lost all his limbs and could only lay there and feel the distant tinglings of parts of him that were no longer there.
Fuck it he said, climbing out of bed and padding over to the window. The gray morning was light in the east, and he remembered a time when that same goddamned sky was leaking rain and he was completely impervious to it. Now, even a faint sun bothered him, annoying and unblinking. Colorless. His was a slate marked only with chalk, no colors, just a black and a white. Binary. One wins, one loses. It was what made him somewhat okay with everything. Forget gray and in-betweens.
I'm not sure what I lost. Maybe I just lot a portion of me and maybe I didn't lose it as much as I gave it away. He realized he was saying this out-loud, to the cold mirror and the colder pane of glass. He laughed a bit, knowing that his coping was just to emote and talk and he remembered vaguely that that was exactly what she never did.
She studied. She parried. She stayed aloft, looking down like she had pushed you from a cliff and then craned her neck out to make sure you made it all the way down to the bottom. She possessed fine eyes, but they were as black holes that pulled in gravity and took in more than they let out. He got that, realized that, remembered that. He was feeling a little bit better, the breaking sky not quite as murky as before, some potential blues leaking in and softening the empty horizon.
He went back to the empty bed, still warm on his side, and laid back down. He remembered the saying "we are all the same size laying down" and smiled again, knowing that he had never been able to prove the adage. He felt like she would be able to mold upon him, fit the jigsaw pieces in perfect places, and just lay in the cooling morning, with only body heat to warm them.
He knew that that would be the case; he knew she knew it and yet as much as they both knew it they let the time spool away and he could not push her and she would not pull. Chemistry is a reaction, but it is not an actual action; it takes muscles, and it takes one's mind. It takes thoughts, and it takes a finger to be lifted, a lip to part. It takes the breathing to inhale and tightly exhale, and it takes a short walk across the room to join.
It takes navigating waters without a sextant, uncharted and unknown. And he lay in the bed full of courage and all alone.
He wondered if she had even contacted him, not live, not in a full hearted way of talking to him, but in a benign and cautious way. A text. An email. An easy way to slide a message across the floor to him.
He went over to his phone and picked it up.
Nothing.
He threw the phone across the room where it met the wall, a simple collision when jigsaw pieces do not fit and they get thrust upon each other and the inevitable happens.
He turned to the window and the sky had lost its blues, and returned to a blank and emptiness that likely mirrored the colors in his mind.
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