Being Meaningless

Short story

This is all true, apart from of course, the many parts that are not. But allow me the reverie of memory, the splendid gluttony of reliving under the dust motes of history. I’m florid, vacuous, vapid, feminine, I am ripe with the flowering buds of rich fricatives and I burst with the fruits of sibilance. This is the truth, as I know it, as only I know it, through this mind that spits and shudders to life in that one great blessing, mitzvah, curse: my words. The truth, written and absolute, about what has been, and what has ended.

I was twenty six, and I loved him. A fact rarely admitted and never acknowledged. I loved him with my palms, my finger tips, I loved him with the ache of his shoulders and the pain of his temples. I loved him, naked in white sheets after efficient sinning, for that moment I truly craved, his begrudged intimacy. I never knew him, but I knew everything. I knew that scar on his arm, the pain in his calves, the wedding ring he never removed for a wife who no longer loved him, I knew the unspoken grief and the fear he burnt off over a Peloton and in overpriced gyms, I knew his ache to love, be loved, be cared for, but not by me, by her. I was a ghost passing through in the space where she should be, a distraction on a pedestal falling fast from the moment of my inception, racing from gloomy white light down hurtling, bleeding and gasping until I…