Umbra

In the natural cycle, rain begets bloom, yet with the passage of time she feels the outer crust of her devotion eroding away, weathered by reality’s storms. Underneath is revealed not the iridescent manifestation of pretty sentiments she thought she would find, phosphorescing like deep-sea coral in such psychedelic shades of cerulean and lavender that would only be deemed imaginable in the imagination – in the symphony of Sirens fading to a niente as a drowning sailor sinks into oblivious meditation – in the fragment of time between an orphan star teetering on the edge and then falling victim to a black hole carousel.
 None of that.
 Instead she finds dull pulp, a fetid thing that resembles spoils from a banquet thrown exclusively for carrion birds, festering in the exposed atmosphere.
This warped topography bears no hint of those years of beautiful divination, of wish bones eagerly pulled apart, the snap lost in the sound of rain pattering against glass, or the shivers that spider-walked up and down her spine whenever he unwound his spool of sweet nothings. She stares despondently at it, uncertain who is to blame for this less-than-pleasant turn of tectonic events– him, for keeping her eyes trained on himself so that she missed the progressing nigrescence of her own soul; or herself – for quite the same reason.