Death of a Nihilist [poetry]

15. auriferous

i didn't know he smoked.

he didn't mention.

it wasn't a big deal.

just another secret, unfurled,

left wide open, somewhere between us,

lost in the significance of an arm motion—of his hand, his fingertips, rolling the withering blunt.

a pale reminiscent, a ghost,

a faint ribbon of fragility.

he was made of static and nothingness,

fragmenting and scattering like the white seeds spilled on borrowed bedsheets,

embodied in a human body

too tight and bored in his own skin.

cradling in the tentative sneer of his mouth, and dissipating within a tightly-wound exhaled smokescreen,

another secret, never to be caressed,

another secret, never to be remembered.

watching him smoke became a routine thing.

a childish fascination, out of a mundane, self-destructive act.

or a delusional aesthetic, on my part,

falling in love not with the mortal in front of me,

but the beautiful summer cold he seemingly represented.

i want the cloudy sky,

the insistent rain,

the urge to pour kerosene down my throat and light my lungs on fire,

the chill curling at the bottom of my stomach and nipping at my heels.

i want to peel off the barest parts of him,

whether he hid them in the curves of his nose or the bow of his lips,

whether he hid them in the delicate metallic click of a lighter scratching against the hushed, midnight air,

or the sound of a cigarette's end, sizzling orange like a brilliant star blinking from afar.

maybe he liked to think so, too.

maybe he liked watching me watch him, too.

because sometimes he would look at me and smile.

the slow, lazy movement rendered hazy and dreamlike,

like the curious gaze of onlookers passing a distant smoke column,

or the swallowed whispers when he reached across the space and kissed me on an inhale.

⸻

auriferous: containing gold

prompt: fire