Charles Dickens once was heard saying about love that to ‘have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts’ is what makes a life worth living. But, he never met my Autumn.

Everything was going well with our relationship. Autumn got upset again – and I was stuck in the world of limbo, not knowing what I had done. Apparently I “shouted at her” by telling her that I had eaten already and I wasn’t hungry. I don’t recall raising my voice, but her asking me six times if I had eaten, and would like to eat – and my subsequent “no, thank you” didn’t get through. Perhaps my voice did get more stern by the sixth time I politely said no, but she reacted as if I had slapped her with some macho dominance…

The part that makes me feel little to nothing…the part that makes me feel like my stomach is chewing in on itself is that in the grand scheme – it’s all just bullshit.

We ruin ourselves over nothing.

Now, it’s the next day. I try to ignore this nagging feeling atop my lungs that weighs down like a bad cluster of rain clouds. I tell myself with whatever wisdom I can muster that “this too shall pass,” and hang on to some distant hope that my companion will call me in the morning to clear the air between us. I linger, and hope as the clock strikes afternoon we will speak. Now it’s the afternoon and we have spoken a handful of times. There hasn’t been a lick of mention of yesterday.

This is what I wanted right? For it to be over. For there to be no problem between us. She speaks normally to me. She calls me a sweet name. She converses with me like we do during the natural setting of our relationship when there is no tension between us. But there is tension. Not that she knows. There is tension within that weighted cloud hovering above my lungs – thundering down with a lightning voice. Saying: “What the Hell was that all about?” Asking, ” Isn’t she going to apologize.”

Just then an imaginary image made of dust and gas appears of my lovely queen. She replies to the one side of me asking what went wrong. She yells back at me in a flurry of heat, ” Me? YOU should apologize.” Suddenly then, my heart gets in between the fight between the clouds hanging over the lungs weighed down further by the dust cloud of my queen’s image. The heart, as it bleeds its colorless goo, plays arbiter among the wolves barking between the ribs of my chest – telling of the good times, of the love, of the sorrow – it is confused.

Just then the clouds hovering strike with thunder, the imaginary dust of my queen, and the muscle flexed with colorless blood, jam the cage of my chest and clog the tunnel leading to any logical thought that may be transmitted to my brain to be the God that will settle the whole of this situation with logic.

No. No. The climax deflates, the clouds sink back to droplets, the dust settles as a mound of dirt, and the heart retreats with a shallow beat. For a moment, I can’t breathe and I feel the best of myself peel off like the side of one banana’s skin. It browns when it meets the sun, and dries into a shriveled bark of what it once was.

I hate her. I hate me. I forget what hate is. The cycle revolved around an event horizon before it is swallowed up by the blackhole it has created for itself. It cycles, it falters, it falls. We are alone for that moment; we are alone for that eternity that takes place between the blinking of our defeated eyes. The blink comes, darkness welcomes — too scared are we by the lack of light that we ignite our vision to open and embrace the light that will again blind us. Our eyes water from the intensity felt. We look, and are blinded. But, willingly, continue on our paths.

by: Patrick Bairamian
Chapter 1