A Virgin's Frailty

Hope departs from the room. And for all she knows, from the world, leaving a monstrous absence in his stead. An open window from which her labored breaths escape into the night invites the faintest glow of moonlight. Beyond, where she believes laughter cannot reach, where music has long since been an unfamiliar refuge, her love tarries in what he believes is ultimate peace.

That morning produced the impossible and enlivened the unthinkable. She watched him go as he conscientiously dragged his feet unto the pavement. He never understood what it means to be loved by the unknown for she never gave him any reason to be led to think so. Nearly half her life, she submitted to him; all that was left of her that didn't hanker for him was a tiny square inch that god knows is sanity.

Inside his confinement, he withdraws all his secrets for living. He forgot what it was like to be out in the open the moment he set foot on those cold marble stones that would soon transmute some of its coldness into him until he turned into something as icy. He looks through the windows with only a fleeting interest, as though the whole world doesn't have anything to do with him anymore or with the people who live in it.

And because she couldn't, for a fee, buy his feelings, she forced herself to feel what few women would: She accepted the unrequited nature of her love. She made it easy simply by getting used to its pain, a pain that would otherwise destroy those who are weak of heart. She had then stopped living without any hint of dying. No one knows how she does it, no one knows for sure what it is that preserves her. And few ever understood that she lost him along with her mind. She would go on loving him; she would withstand many a test of time; and the love would go on enlarging itself to consume her at last.

She loves him just by thinking of him. She knows this much is true.

END