‘I love cloud watching’ he said softly, staring o into space.

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‘I love cloud watching’ he said softly, staring o into space.
I watched the chalk of him go gold in the amber rose of a cool spring morning, the mahogany returning to his leaden curls, the twinkle of his iris in the luminescence of an ethereal hot pink sky. Here he was... And who was he?

‘No you don't.’

I knew you.

These sapphire jewels sank from the polyester duvet of the universe to nd me. And who was I? To sit here and challenge him this way. I felt like an imposter. The dreadful irony of it.

‘No I don’t,’ he echoed, playfully... Mockingly? He was mocking me. Mocking my starkness, the matter-of-fact of it, woven into the fabric ectoplasm of my being. I liked it. I would always love whatever humour he found in my nature. It meant I was loveable.

‘I guess not,’ he continued, ‘but there’s something so solemn about...’

His eyes lifted back up, up and away from little ol’ me. Suppose I should get used to it. He’d made this thorny viridian skin of the earth his God’s Acre. And I guess my face sank at the thought because then suddenly he’s staring again. Through me? No at me, at me.

‘I hate it.’
His lips pull into a wry, pallid smile. ‘I know.’
The emerald lemon of the meadow clung to my skin, desperate, invading. Glittery sunrise

wind waning in, pervading, ooding with echoes of daredevil avenues and winding fearless lanes, upon the asphalt blazing rubber and the redolence of gasoline. My eyes burst to life, to reality, and there he is sitting up now. Watching me. He’s still here.

‘I was thinking about us. Back then before... Back when we met and you were all daring and macho and I was this uptight, naïve little guy who knew nothing of what he was getting into...’ — I hesitate for a moment, waiting for him to mockingly echo back “you were?” Except this doesn’t happen, for his gaze is meditative and intense, and empty — ‘and the stu we did, spearing across streets and staying up together and going on adventures because that’s what people do when they...’

His expression softens, he’s in agony. So am I. Because my voice breaks, perhaps to choke me, to strangle me, to suocate what mustn’t be said.

‘I don’t know how much more I can take this,’ I exhale.
He reaches out to me, a hand extended to my face, to wipe the crystalline o my broken

porcelain. But he stops himself, because he knows trying would make it so much worse. I see

the thought icker within his gleaming Stygian eyes, the mahogany fading, and his skin is insipid chalk once more.

‘I love you,’ he says nally, absolute and real.
And I, ‘I love you too.’
And so we sat, and found comfort in each other’s forlorn, and lost ourselves in our eyes,

and then up, up into the ethereal luminescence of a cloudless hot pink sky. Because not even the amber rose of a cool spring morning could cleave together the broken tethers of life and... The other thing.

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