Plunge

Her crushing beauty struck me. It had the power to annihilate. Resonant, it echoed in the far corners of my mind, long after we parted. I have not done enough to save her. A cruel thought, and it echoed, haunting me. I wondered, if perhaps, like Icarus, she had fashioned herself a pair of wings. And I wondered, also, if, like Icarus, their wax adhesive had melted when she chose to fly too close to the sun.

I willed her to awaken, as any fallen angel would awake. She did not. She remained motionless, broken, and so crushingly beautiful. Broken things can have such beauty. Just as beauty can break. And break. And break. And still remain beautiful. Seeing such beauty broken, my heart fled. It took a shadowy and circuitous route, between particle and wave, between desperation and satiation. It spoke in iridescent fragments, punctuated by the passion of frenzied electrons, washed away by millions of teardrops doomed to eternally wander. Then plummeting, with cataclysmic passion, toward a sea of melted wax.

And then, I felt her spirit, tender and gentle, touch my cheek. 'I came to comfort you,' she whispered silently, 'to offer you deliverance.' I did not want comfort. I did not want deliverance, I wanted to follow my heart, to plunge, into silent oblivion. In my grief, so precipitous, I sought only the heaviness of descent. I could never conquer my grief. And so, I surrendered, allowing it to conquer me.