Dissolved like Alkasetzer

She had called crying and I had imagined the tears streaming down her face, her mascara drawing lines from her swollen eyes to her chin. She said, “Come home, I need you,” and that was all it took for me to pack my bags and return to the unknown. And thus, I boarded that plane unaware of the blatant alterations I would be presented with upon landing. Two months before we found ourselves at the edge of the depths of the Vaucluse, guitar in hand and Ricki Nelson songs trickling out of our mouths, our vocal cords vibrating and the sound of bliss echoing and reverberating around us. But now, as soon as my feet hit the tarmac and throughout the long train ride from Paris to the Avignon station, the blurred scenery dancing on my pupils, it was evident that during my absence, an entire universe had dissolved like an Alkasetzer in a half-empty glass of water and all that remained were infinitesimal particles of that which we had been. Ricki Nelson, laughter, summer trips along the Côte d’Azur, stopping at each alcove, each place, has now been replaced with a deafening silence and the knowledge of your imminent departure. And while you were contemplating your escape, getting out your scissors to cut the threads that bound you to us, we spent the nocturnal hours wiping the saline tears from our lachrymose eyes and blanched faces, each minute ticking away alerting us of the bomb that would absolve our current lives.

And as you snipped at each thread, severing ties, you allowed us to fall away from you, to keep falling into this somber chasm, our limbs flailing in the air, flesh tearing from our brittle bones as we screamed and cried, the sound muffled, stuck like dust particles in our tracheas.

I scratched, clawed at the film of our past, the images projected onto an imaginary white sheet in the crevices, folds of my mind but to no avail-- we were losing you. We were clenching our fists, our knuckles turning white and cracking and you were the sand trickling through our phalanges, falling to the cold, marble floors and scattering throughout the Provence with the gust of wind that was reality.