I loved her. I loved her more than I knew how to love myself and all I’ve left is this afterlife memory of sensations, a cobbled dream of her creation.

She is marble and concrete and crushed magnolia petals, bent and rusted rebar wrapped in silk and soft cotton, her movement echoing the groaning of the earth. The juicy spill of a thousand thousand peaches fermenting in copper veins, the muted roar of churning mechanisms housed in filigree and feathers, bramble and blackberry and buckthorn. Embers banked inside weeping topaz the light men break themselves like waves on rocks to drown in, scarring sacrifice into optic nerves that will never know peace.

She owns perfection in the ragged lines of plump lips stung to swollen by one hundred bees: nothing pretty is without price. Sculptor’s hands a framework of steel and balsa, broken and broken and broken again until the agonies of understanding are nuanced in every knuckle.

My automaton darling, brilliant nightmare angel, singing this need into the wound of her mouth I tried to call her to me. Decades of sanity siphoned into the way she built herself in the abstract of my mind as I had finally, finally built her in my reality- What lightning strike would quicken her breath for me? I felt myself dying in this emptiness.

After a lifetime of bitter nights, the answer bloomed like a sickness in my throat; In order to tell the story of her burning life, I had to set mine on fire. Without a second’s hesitation, I breathed the last of my heat into her lungs and succumbed to my lifetime’s obsession, understanding that the creation of love is its own end.