The Ink Road

She stood by the curve of the road, her eyes wide, hopeful. She didn’t know why she was hopeful, she just was. Just as she didn’t know why she was short, or why she had blue eyes, or why chocolate tastes like liquid heaven. Some things like these just are.

He wandered down the road, as if he was trying to pretend he didn’t have a care in the world. He didn’t do a very good job at pretending. Gently his lips kissed the cigarette resting in-between his middle and ring fingers, sucking like a baby from a bottle for some life giving smog. He wondered if he would ever be able to kick this life-long addiction.

She gently bites her lip as she stalks past that bar, the one where people’s stories sprawl across the surfaces. It’s made of nothing but ink; there is no wood, no steel, no concrete; nothing to keep the wild feelings at bay. As she stalks past her hope is washed away by fear. She is pretending she can’t feel the words running down her back and the call of long dead voices.

He looks at her as she stalks past the bar made of ink. Seated safely inside, he cannot understand her fears. He remembers the days where they would dance, covered in nothing but ink, the words flowing around them, liquid silver on their tongues. He opens his mouth like a door, the words flood the back of his throat, ready to jump at her and wrap her in his arms once again. He swallows them with a cloud of smoke.

She sits down; her back hunched as the weight of the world presses againced her on the edge of the gutter. Her gutter. This is the place where she has cried in long gone lovers arms, where she has sat and watched the stars fly past, where she falls once the ink is done with her. Slowly her head sinks to rest in her hands as she tries to resist the call of the ink and him.

He watches her, she leans back againced her hands, the gravel digging into them. Then suddenly she hunches, as if in pain. Gently the legs of his chair scrape the ink covered ground. The ink swirls around his feet. Desperately he tried to run, to get to her. The ink keeps him incased. He knows why she’s running now.

He remembers the night he came home, to find all her journals alight, the ink burning. He remembers looking into her eyes and her smelling his fear. He remembers how she’d then burnt his diaries, or tried to. He still has the scars from the flames. Suddenly, he relies that he has trapped himself in ink. In his past.

She gets up and walks off. She doesn’t hear him cry out for her to save him.

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