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It rains when she’s gone.
It rains, and there are pitter-patters on your window, fingers on melted sand and bare feet at your doorstep, and if you bother to glance at the pane the drops are the flecks of violet in her eyes, and she presses her face against the glass and stares at you.
You don’t look out your window when it rains, don’t do so much as look up; you haven’t for a while that’s felt as long as time itself and when it rains the clock turns seconds into hours and all you can do is gaze at the floor. You count the cracks in the tiles, the creaks in the wood as you make your way across and you wait.
Everything is waiting now, sitting and waiting and staring at old pieces of things that might have been alive at one point, that might have drifted to you if you’d wished hard enough as you held her hand and showed her the stars. Your index finger is long and bony and she follows it to the heavens and back, asking questions through her smiles. She marvels at the lights in the sky, the little wings of fireflies stuck all the way up there and if you make a wish on them they’ll give you hope and she laughs because you know she believes it.
You don’t wish at first because when you close your eyes all you can see are the backs of your eyelids, dull and blank and your mind paints a starless sky that’s as lifeless as what you didn’t know you’d become. You open your mouth in protest but her digits are splayed across your face and she is the whispered breeze that tells you to think of what makes you, creates you, paint with the colours you’re given and imagine.
Your eyes scrunch up as you try and she giggles, all seashells and bird whistles, and all that appears are shocks of white, crackling across your vision as she brushes skin down your arm, telling you there’s always next time right?
But there wasn’t, not really, because you stood on the beach more than once, looking from the sky to your hands, stretching your fingers like there was webbing between them, all fish gills and hardened scales and you were never the artist type. And it always rained.
It always rained when you were alone.
There’s a hollow, tinny sound as water hits your walls, and you stand, legs of rusted iron creaking as you sway. You can’t look up but you feel like something’s off, different from the usual downpour and between blinks you realize there’s a gap in the raindrops and something is there.
You aim to turn your head the right way, lowered at an angle but in the midst of it there’s a flicker of sparks and you look into medusa’s eyes to meet burnt-grey-and-purple and you heart turns to stone, shattering in on itself as it tries to waltz along your veins.
She’s at your window.
Her breath fogs up a shaky circle and you are before her in less than seconds, meeting her delicate hand with your own, splaying it across the pane to mirror her, become her and you touch without ever making contact. Her eyes don’t blink, locking with yours and pouring into you and it used to be too much, used to wound you in the process, but you open yourself and she swims between your ribs and you wonder why you can never feel her anymore.
Her lips ghost words and you watch them form against the glass, dissipating fog in the drying air as you mouth back, and you know what she’s saying because it’s what she always says, what you could never do and can’t you come out for just a little while?
Her fingers twist around your vocal cords and you want to choke, fish in your throat and then she becomes the tide and you press yourself harder against the window as she pools around your organs. You bubble, and your mouth begins to gape and you want to tell her to stop but then she pulls, and your line of vision breaks while everything falls and falls to pieces and suddenly you are covered in red and water is hitting your face.
Something is sticking out of you, crushed heart on your sleeve and she presses, heats it till it boils and scars and burns through and it melts onto you, into you, dyed crimson with love and you can feel it lodged in your arm but her touch evades your senses. You sit up, the rain carving rivers to your landscape, seeping down your esophagus. It tastes of metal, tangy and raw and you realize the red is you, spilling onto the rocks in cresting waves. You can’t feel the ocean coming out of you, numb as ice, but she calls out and you’re standing, looking, yelling at the top of your lungs but she’s darted between the raindrops and you can never feel her anymore.
Your hands are shaking like a marionette, tied up and cumbersome and you lean back, tilt your head up to the sky and note how blank it looks, dull and lifeless and you guess you could be the sky because so are you. And if you are the sky, you decide, then you are better off blind, so you close your eyes to a carbon copy of dead space, rusted fingers at your sockets that dig inwards as you catch a glimpse of what isn’t supposed to be there.
She presses her face to yours inside your skull, waterfalls of red running from her mouth down to a chest pried open, contents long splattered on cold cement. She kisses you, spilling into your lungs and you can feel yourself gaping again, drowning but this time you’re ready for it, this time you’re silent, and you reach into yourself and touch where her heart is supposed to be.
You want her to take you with her, you want to swim through your own ribs and melt into her warmth, all dusty scales and tight fins and you can’t call out but you reach farther in and pull her close and she’d be cold by now, half rotten and you don’t realize she’s stopped until her eyes are meeting yours. You give her a look, confusion twisting around you in moray eels and coelacanths, but she looks back, shakes her head and pushes off into the water.
You examine the things she’s left behind.
Her blood is in your lungs, and you remember her smile at ten years old, telling you to create from what creates you, laughing at the night sky and running through the waves. And then knowledge presents itself to you, popping the cork off a message-in-a-bottle, lodged between the sand in your toes, and it’s taken you nineteen years but you finally
understand.
You paint.
You reach down your windpipe and take the gift she left behind, and she is your ruby red, fresh against the dead sea-sky as your fingers stretch to etch stars into the fabric and there is a jolt that courses through you and you are suddenly aware of what her blood smells like. And what her touch feels like. And how her kisses taste. And something is pulling at you, at the corners of your lips because you pulse with molten heat and liquid sunshine and you inhale and shake and for the first time in nineteen years you laugh.
You’ve painted the sky. You’ve painted it and it sparkles, shines crystalline with your love spelt out in constellations, looking from her finger to the heavens and back and you wish more than anything she was here, that you could show her what she’s taught you and you could kiss her until your lips turn blue and your teeth are sharp against your mouth and you stop. Because the wind tastes of coral, and there is a slow, steady light on the other side of your eyelids.
It isn’t raining anymore.