Tags
bored, dust, freewriting, heartbreak, hidden, loss, love, mindfulness, musings, noir, quiet, sad, silence, sleep, story
“It’s only a bit of metal …like you said.” She whispered. The thin band clattered with a hollow resonance against the polished oak desk. The silence I’d grown all but too accustomed to was broken by a promise that never should have been. Through years of investigating cold cases on colder nights with nothing but the ticking of a brass clock to keep me company, never had I heard a sound quite so… empty.
She stood tall and almost rigid. Her lips remained firm and resolute. Waiting… Wanting for me to say anything to convince or plead or beg. Any small word could have halted the momentum of what had been set in motion. Just a word or even a whisper or… or an explosion of frustration from the other side of the desk. But there was nothing. Only silence. That horrible, deafening silence. …and a clock.
I stared at the ring. Lifeless.
I looked in her eyes. Loveless.
Letters failed to form words in the confounded reaches of my mind. Drawing on the depths of that hollow I so callously referred to as a soul, I caught a glimmer of an illogical logic with enough traction to convince her to stay.
But if such were to be, she’d been damned to a relationship with a ghost. And as much as I had never been there in the past, no promise to leave my trembling lips could make a faint possibility into a reality for her happiness.
Words sat on my lips. And that’s where they lay. Could have lain there til the crack of hell stretched across the sky and swallowed time and matter as we know it. But even then, with nothing to lose, they wouldn’t sound.
Her face drew into the pointed, pinched sadness I’d never wanted to face before. Her silhouette blackened as she stepped into the light through the main door. And with a heavy softness, the latch clicked behind her.
That was the last I saw of her. That slim silhouette etched in my mind through frosted glass. That’s a sight i never could forget. A shattered vow is but a sad statement of man’s life. Or a legacy etched in granite.