It was just a fortnight earlier that I had received the letter from Billings…
My journalistic mentor and colleague of many years…
My counterbalance…
A friend.
I’d never had many.
Nadja had written to him asking for our forgiveness…
Our…
Forgiveness.
She had never, to my knowledge, written to me, nor had she in any other way attempted to apologize or explain away the days and nights between us that went…
Before…
And then…
Away.
In that other…
War.
She had written to Billings.
Comical, really.
The most expressionless, lusterless, cynical clam known to me…
And yet…
A friend…
A friendship…
That could only have been forged amid the chaos we had experienced in all those horrid places…
Nadja had after all those years found him, and had sent him the letter which had prompted him to write me a letter of his own…
After all those years.
But despite the letter and what it said, all I could think about was the woman…
And how we burned.
I know that Billings told me not to get involved…
That I was to “remain neutral, and objective” at all times…
When she put her eyes on me…
And then her hands…
I had to touch her…
To kiss her…
To hold her down and be inside of her…
As a matter of life…
And death.
It started beneath strobe lights and then bled itself out…
As interlude…
Unto candlelight…
And then dawn.
In a horrid place.
The stench of reality…
Real…
Human…
Desperation…
All around.
It was that confluence of desperation…
Empathy…
And longing for some ineffable understanding of what it was the world wanted or expected from people, in general…
That made me susceptible to her.
It was all of that…
And her eyes…
Her lips.
Once I succumbed, I was like an animal with her.
For three months it was like that.
We were insatiable.
Billings tried everything to pull me back from the precipice of ruin, but I wanted nothing more or less than…
Nadja.
As I was recollecting all of this, the little bird at my side on the bar pecked me at the leg.
It looked up at me as if expectantly.
Nadja had long since turned off the lights and gone to bed.
The night’s chill encroached in its own interpretation of shelter.
The wind as a constant thief of solace.
I looked up at the sky.
The sickly moon had become audacious in its early angle, and seemed now scarlet…
Hewn.
I whispered unto bird,
“We wouldn’t want to spoil too soon
the pleasures we would want or will
we would not for flesh, or even moon
disrupt this surreal state of…
Still.”
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