Remembering Midnight

What happened to her?

She had a voice of a spring song bird, but her flightless wings fluttered helplessly, trying to keep her from drowning in the pain. Music was her only escape from the misery and so she sang sad a slow songs, taking deep breaths to keep her head above the flood of emotion. Her eyes were the emerald gemstones buried in the earth and her hair was wavy like caramel milk chocolate that melted on his tongue, sweet and intoxicating. But her eyes were blind to her beauty and she only saw the pain that weighed down her wings and greyed the world around her. Everything was grey in comparison to his eyes, the beautiful aqua orbs that once drank in every inch of her beauty. But he is long gone and left her with such a heavy burden that she now must wear her heart on her broken and scattered wing.

What happened to her? War is what happened to her. War brought him to her in a scarlet socked head bandage that made his golden hair stick out in every direction. He was barely clinging to life when they met and even then he still managed to flash a crooked, heart-stopping, dimpled grin in her direction. She had saved him, sewn together his physical and mental wounds and in the process he had taken her heart in his weathered yet kind hands. But war is what took him away from her again; a different war; a war inside his head that even she couldn’t mend. She found him like she had on the first day they met; a scarlet river dripping down his chin, another casualty of war. She was never whole again and her nimble, healing finger ceased to work.

What happened to her? She drifted away on a calm twilight, searching for the dawn the she knew would never come, while she sang to the Big Dipper, a song about better times. She still sings, through the whispering wind that blows on rainy nights, singing to her love, the blond haired soldier who died much too soon.

I look down at the pulsing blue line under my thin ivory skin and find it hard to believe that there is something living underneath this pale empty shell. In the moonlight shinning through my window it’s even harder to believe that I am real as the darkness fades rationality and leaves me bare of my armor that I hold up in the day. In the dark I am nothing special, my red hair dies and turns into a mousey carpet that covers half my face. My gray eyes look even grayer and my hallow cheek bones are even more pronounced in the shadows. It’s no wonder my friends beg me to eat when they see me only watching my food at lunch. But food has become bland and the dark bags under my eyes tell a sad story of how the nightmares that keep me up all night have become my reality.

It’s hard to believe that there is something alive under this white ivory skin that clings to my bones. But the blue pathways that pulse steadily under this shell gives me hope that I might actually be alive in there somehow. Somewhere.