In the growing shadows

Killers vs. Zombie Nation vs Bloody Beetroots - Somebody Warped Kernkraft 400

He found himself at a bar.

In the growing shadows he cursed himself.  You see the bar was on the street, her street.  He had taken caution to move his way there.  A jut, a dogleg, a detour that elongated a simple trip into a crooked crusade.  But it was done.  He had to spend as little time on her street as he had to.  True, the bar was much further down, but it was her street nonetheless.  Inside, he looked at the guests.  The simple divide of segregated tables filled with separate conversations.  A microcosm or return to Jr. High School all over again.  Girls with girls, boys with boys.  Tongues flickered with the excitement of fashionable bravado of what could have been, might have been, should have... if only a coin had fallen the other way.

Yet the shadows grew.  That is always where she found the most comfort, the partial hidden.  Any slight sight of skin made her vulnerable.  He laughed.  He was little different.  He preferrerd to hide in the plan open.  The mask he wore was one of the rogue caviler.  She could be the damsel in distress.  She would find someone to save her, even if it wasn't him the fool paladin.
 
He laughed.

He had little time for that.  He had to get her off his mind.  This wouldn't have happened to Ulysses.  Tempest tossed waves could never drown his vision.  Not Ulysses.  He would return home, he would break from his second act.  He had to.  The circle had to be complete.  He laughed.  A raise of the pint.

Time was linear.  The shadows grew.

Well, he must have been a better man than he.  The laugh while looking into the trace of carbonation surrounding the lip of the beer in his glass.

He had seen her on that street before.  It was an accident.  She was with the other.  One of many.  Walking, laughing, life was good... for her.  She wore sunglasses so that she could cast a smile at anyone.  Life is easier that way.  He laughed as the pain hit his heart.

Inside, he felt it.  That phantom pain.  A name given to the pain in the arms or legs that had long been separated through amputation.  You hear of the numb agony of World War One Vets.  The sharp cry arising from a section of the body that is no longer there.  The reality, it was nothing more than a ghost of something that would be forever gone.  Rather than a limb, his pain rose from that section of his hart that he had given.

Growing shadows brought to his mind the temptation to drive by her house.  For what purpose wasn't clear.  She was disgusted by him.  He had loved her so greatly he had killed her.  Was it his fault?  Was it hers?  Neither.  It was the passage of that irrevocable one known only as time.  She had the freedom to change, as had he.  So, she used her freedom, as had he.  While she used hers to go one way, like a fool he had built a house of nothing more than cards that he told himself was so strong.  So elegant.  Till the winds came, causing it to crash.

The growing shadows at times released light.

The tumult had been too much.  As his pyramid crumbled for the second time all he could do was watch aghast.  It threw him back.  The shock of returning to the neighborhood where you grew up to find that landmarks have been replaced by the new, the brash, which in a way makes them even more garish than they actually are.  A piece of you was lost.

He forced his mind to change tracks.  In the ash there was still so much.  Traces of iron, thin as wire, continued to connect.  Disjointed memories seemingly so insignificant numbed the sharpness of her cutting coup de gras.  Driving, he doesn't remember where, or when.  He only knew that it was at night.  A sudden stop was called for.  Like a protective tiger, his arm shot out immediately.  Not for the pleasure of a stolen brush, no it was to protect her.  To save her, if such a simple token could do anything.  Why even a time or two, where there passion play had been stopped, in the flurry he had watched; he waited; to make sure that she had covered herself.  So it was.  She was gone.  It was never him that wasn't good enough for her.  It was she that wasn't....

He wouldn't say that.  He couldn't.  The dying cold of the glass signified that his drink was almost done.  He wouldn't do a drive by.  He would get off that street as soon as he could.  He had to.  Muddled thoughts only clouded his mind.  The press of the door displayed his exit.

He knew his trip was over.

In the growing shadows he cursed, as he found the light.