Falling out of Love:
The sodden leaves are damp underfoot, she needs new shoes and the last 2 inches of her blue jeans are saturated with early morning due. Her pace quickens, her heart beats faster and she feels she can still hear his gruff, cold voice resonating in her ears, through her skull, down her spine and into her churning stomach. Why? why say those things, why treat her with such aggressive contempt?
She stops; her hands clench into fists as though around his insignificant throat, and her knuckles turn white in frustration. She can feel the churning in her stomach moving through her abdomen and resting uncomfortably in her larynx. She turns, looking through the bowing canopy of reverend, twisted branches as if to call out to anyone, anything that would listen. But she swallows, her face contorts, she commands her tear ducts to with-hold their flow and continues on her way, far, far away.
Now her pace is slow, deliberate, each step an act of defiance to the thing she has developed an unabounded hatred for. It came from no-where, rose like a tidal wave out of a still ocean to engulf her with total and uncompromising fear and disgust. It washes over her in suffocating waves like the bile rising from her liver and she wretches, dry and spasmodic into the undergrowth. She kicks the damp grass, scuffing her already mud-caked shoes, she stamps her feet, punches the trees, tears at the damp bark. She wants to self-destruct, descend into self induced delirium but the prospect of artificial amnesty is unlikely. She stops again, abandons the thought of going home, abandons the thought of ever going back - not that the thought had crossed her muddled ever darkening mind. She spots a clear area, slips off her jacket and hunkers down on the cold gound, lifts her hip flask to her lips and renews her inebriation with a long slow embibement of the warm liquor. She lights her last cigarette and slips into a bewildered acceptance of her deteriorating state. Night, turns to morning, turns to dawn as the sky bleeds and she looks to the new day for an answer, but she knows that this is only the first stumble of her long awaited fall.