Beautiful Flames

The kiss of her lips brought me out of my mournful reverie, as her lipstick left a rouge imprint on the side of my cheek. Instantly, I remembered what we had been doing to forget our loss: Dancing. We were dancing the most beautiful, exquisite dance I have ever danced. It was sheer bliss. Sheer, simple bliss in its most pure and unadulterated form. Lust, to put it in its most plain and simple form. It helped me forget all the pain, for just a few moments, at least. But then it came all flooding back to me. The accident, the crash, the flames, all of it. The inferno of the crash, it was all so beautiful, so mesmerizing, and so...so purifying.

After the dance, she left, and went back to work, but her memory stayed behind, lingering with me, like an ethereal presence bound to me. I held the memory of her form close, as I tried to remember more of the crash, more of that beautiful, beautiful blaze. The clouds that night were dark and stormy, and the rain that fell from the skies was as hard as ice, pounding against the car like a million little bullets. It was hard to see through the rain, and it wasn’t until the collision that we thought anything was going wrong. As it turned out, everything had gone horribly, horribly wrong. As I found out later from the nurses and doctors, we’d collided head on with an oil truck, which is what caused all those beautiful, lovely flames. If only we hadn’t been rescued by the EMTs, otherwise I’d still be there, in the flames, feeling their sweet, cold embrace. Instead, I’m stuck here, in this hospital bed, waiting for my dancing partner to return, but she never does. She never does, because she never made it to the ER. She burned and burned and burned in those sweet flames, while I watched as they dragged me away, kicking and screaming. I miss her, so very much.