creative writing

I enter through the gate, its cold irons bound to deter all but the most melancholy. The place is crowded with the thick silence of the dead. Their bodies, encased in caskets, cannot create sounds capable of penetrating the surface. The muffled buzz of their muted thoughts, too deep for me to fathom, weigh in the air like an insensible fog. They saturate the gravity of the place.

I feel cobblestones beneath my feet and remember how my bike jolted as I had raced home against the day. The lights guide me forward, under sky and over stone, illuminating the tree that had sheltered our soft kisses and the sidewalk where I had lifted her after she stumbled. A car drives by, its formulaic noise splashing over me, dampening the reality of love that beckoned me forward. It drives away the faint echo of her laugh, a proud and glad song that defied the demons that tormented her. Love was present in that laugh. I see this.

Two women walk down the street, headed toward a gas station, smoking. Their cigarettes have a light beyond the red glow of…

I open my eyes and see an amorphous fog that muffles the tonal differences among the shades that seem suddenly unsayable—the way that, at the decisive moment, your mouth forgets how to shape the name of the very person you most love. Objects beckon me, doing nothing more than exist, than flicker at the horizon of my gaze. Each clamors with an internal drive to reveal itself, light sparking outward, radiating from its core…