Chapter #? - Entitled - SHE WOULD RATHER SLEEP IN HER MIND'S BOUDOIR.

From a larger work in process and hopefully, progress - entitled A Sense of Scent.

Q. She would rather sleep in her mind’s boudoir.

Claudelean tore through the air, trying to gain distance from the words that were making her eyes wet. She did not believe she could hold herself up anymore. She did not believe she had the energy to be as strong as she seemed. Instead, she imagined how she appeared dashing through the darkness. She imagined black ink stamped across her front or even soot on her skin from the night’s texture. She believed it would never wash off. Then she imagined how she appeared like a child trying to exit a nightmare. She believed she was an actress; nothing more trying than a youthful starlet and nothing better either. She thought she could play along, so she took advantage of the scene and feigned the role of her myth. But there was no audience watching, no one to tell her she had been believable. 

Descending the stairs to her cabin, she wondered whether being strong had made love more difficult. Emotions strained the soul and it always had made her insecure that if they were revealed, others would acknowledge them as the scars of experience. Alone in her room, she felt like she was in a cave sheltered from nature’s temperamental climate. But it was not a cave because there was a mirror and inside of it was a reflection of her standing self. She stood in the track of silence watching how wounds transform imagery. Having stopped, her tears came spiraling loose and raced downwards at a pace and path of their own. She saw the way a mood decorates the landscape of skin—reconditioning an appearance—changing the spectator’s impression, expression and at times, unfavorably, his reaction to it. She extended her arms, hoping to press upon something tangible. And it appeared like she was reaching out with a desperate longing to be realized. But feeling nothing there, she sensed she might not exist either. Coming closer to the mirror, she sat before the vanity and looking out Claudelan saw into a face she believed she had never seen. It was at that moment, she felt she was becoming less of herself and more of some other. 

At that moment, too, a knock could be heard seeping beneath the door. It was Llurence. He knocked again hoping for entrance through her barrier. She opened the door. He came to her. But before her, she realized his mood had changed and because of it, his voice carried the effects of a different tone. She thought him less sincere. 

The thing about lovers though is they see through eyes of intoxication. And quite similarly, the thing about intoxication is one’s perception softens and one’s judgment begins to flow smoothly soothing the drinker’s sensations like wine. Lovers and drinkers alike sense their selves differently and take shape like waves—appearing externally calm, yet in a constant flux of internal emotion. Rising to the surface is the fleshy foam of salvia, spilling out at climax and dissolving like pearls on the body of the sea. Lubricated lovers involved in romantics crouch over their partner’s heart and press their bodies upon their cage, until with a discharge that saturates sight and makes the night’s body feel warmer, does the lovers collapse and break the heart’s brittle boned cage. 

Aside from the burden mixed within her blood and swimming through the sewer of her veins, Claudelean’s eyes had been heavy with tears when Llurence knocked. Eyes so heavy, she would choose to remember, that she had not been able to see at all. However, they both would remember they were intoxicated that night. But only she would remember that it was not love that had mastery over her room, but lovers. Their judgment had been sensitive, but it was Claudelean’s that also was subject to change. 

She did not remember the kiss or why it came. But she remembered his lips were like shells cutting her and possibly with the intention of making her bleed. She kissed him like she had forgotten how their lips had worked together. But persisted, feeling she needed to know that it could be the same. It never would be though. Her lips moved passively, her body becoming more objectified than it had ever been. She worked at feeling, but becoming only successfully discouraged, expressed a carnal resentment. With her body curved over his bareness, she could not pull herself away—not knowing whether she was holding on a moment more with the desire to have the last kiss take the longest or whether it was because she did not want to not kiss him again. 

He entered her, but it did not feel like love was being made. Instead, it was like the ripping apart of souls. She became dry and for the first time ever, he spit on his hands and moistened the crease of her labia until it satisfied the sensation he needed to finish. After, he fell over her and she responded with her nails tearing down his back’s flesh. But his blood was harder to draw than her tears, trickling into a mosaic around her cheeks, taking on the saddest shade of rose. 

Lying next to him, Claudelean breathed with all the strength that was left in her heart. It sounded like it was the air she needed most. 

"You have always been the most romantic," Llurence said. His words cut the silence with his tongue that was like a knife. "But tonight you succeeded even yourself. Our whole relationship, I never figured if I irritated you even a touch, the passion would intensify extraordinarily."

His words coiled into a sentence and strangled her like a noose. She wanted to escape him. She knew he was trying to kill their love, so it never could live again. But she could not move away because she could not breathe either. 

"Claudelean are you awake?"

Always. 

"If you could have one wish what would it be?"

For an instant to forget my body. 

An incomprehensible distance lay between them. Llurence made no notice of the change. But Claudelean could not avoid feeling it. She wished she could believe otherwise, but knew that she was not the dreamer that Llurence was. And watching him fall beneath sleep, she did not think it was good to be either. 

At that moment Claudelean surrendered to her fantasies. She acknowledged what she been driven to do and what it was she thought she wanted. But memories were bubbles and she experienced how coming too close, thinking they were tangible, would make them burst into invisibility. They were not balloons either. She could not hold on and carry them into the future. Becoming aware that Llurence would not be a quick and accessible answer for future happiness was substantially sobering. She knew how easy and even enjoyable it had been to fall back inside the memory of him often. He remained to be seen as long as her memory stayed to be looked upon. But it was time she let it go. It was time she let the memories leave her. 

She needed dreams—the dying of controlled consciousness and the descent into the most encompassing darkness—to erase the nuance of the night. In her sleep, she could talk to herself as if she were alone and no greater than a child speaking a language of her own invention. Her eyes closed with a final thought, The distance has changed us both.