The vines in rapture, twisting their songs through the branches of blossoms, were copper. Tying in shining beauty. The opaque ivory blossoms rained with the wind emerging as a cloud over the bursting lush of riverbank grasses. The path was of stone unseen, I buried my face in his collarbone.

“This is a dream,” I said. He tightened his arms around me.

“I know.” From a thousand miles away, this was something here, in my mind. The copper vines glinted in a sky overcast by crimson. It was a light filled with darkness. The wind swayed the branches he had his back to, but which I cried into his shoulder for. How long can one remain in a mystery like this? The wind became his breath in my ear.

“I said I’d never lie. So I’m here.” Would the scene disappear if I released my grip? A heartbreaking risk. But we had to return to the house. Slowly, slowly, I withdrew, and turned to the meadow, still grasping his fingers. Behind me, I glimpsed what he had watched happening for the audience of my back and his eyes alone: it was frosted over. I whirled back into him, fear burning in my eyes. The time we had was short.

The blank walls encircled us; I wanted to write on them, to tell them to calm. He stood in the center, reading the gold pages of my leather-bound journal. Within that life, I walked in the company of his guidance. But now, the pendant to the chain I wore was lost; disappeared in the drifting snow of December. I collapsed, conscious, on the floor.

But the floor became a stretcher, his footsteps entering my room to the beat of the heart monitor. Our heart monitor. And the stretcher became our bed, inside the mansion of the meadows; the copper vines outside the dusty glass. With one finger he traced my eyes, my ears, then he stole the words from my lips. I drifted away to the soft hum of his voice. It had been a day, it had been a year. I awoke to my own cry for help.

In the words merely whispered, disappeared ‘me’. “Who died at the end of your nightmare?” was his query. As she gazed into the ebony eyes that read her heart, she raised her voice for the callused words, to be said again: “I Love You.” Dripping over the shadows of gaunt cheekbones were shameless tears. It had been self-righteous of her to disclose her divinity. Where she had grazed her knuckles along the mahogany headboard in slumber, crimson welled, making slow progress in its quest to stain the satin bedclothes. Placing warm, work-worn palms to both sides of her jaw, he said a single word –

“Sleep.” And so she closed her eyes, and he gazed at her for the remaining night.

Blankness covered the ivory walls, then turned to ink. Only my words and my mind remained in the room. He had long since left. Around me:

L’amour, c’est ne pas libre. You are alone. Stay silent, they will capture you. Weed out your weaknesses. You know why he’s gone. You know why he’s gone. You know why he’s gone.
In efforts to quell the will of the room shouting at me, a miserable failure had been discovered.