Untitled - Chapter 1

– I imagine things would be a little different without these walls here.
– We’d keep running until we were locked in by walls again.
– So you think that this … moment was inevitable?
– As much as I’d hate to admit it, yeah. You can only run for so long. And we’ve been doing it for a while.
– So what now?
– We stand and face that which we fear the most.

So this needs some context. In my head, I can recite an epic as the light from the entrance begins to be blotted out. My heart stops beating. My lungs collapse as I gasp for breath in a moment that lasts forever. My greatest fear is about to blot the two of us in what I can only hope will be an instant.

Taking time back, not to the ever so clichéd beginning, no. To another point. A midway point – cause it’s a long journey to the beginning. We need a pit-stop along the way. This is that pause. Stop me if I’m going too fast. If my thoughts and words are running a mile a minute. Cause I’m about to die here. Or, worse yet, be crippled and left alive to experience an existence afterwards.

The two of us in this corner, Jen and I have known each other forever. And I mean forever. This lady, a real psychotic bitch, she told us so. Armed with an old and chipped crystal ball that she held in a thick red shawl. She said she was connected to the supernatural. To the forces around us that held us in check and ensured that what would be, would still and always be so.

She cornered us. No, not like this time, but more of imposing her presence upon us on a busy sidewalk. We huddled together against the wall of an old shop filled with antiquities and fossils that had not yet been granted names. We drowned in the depths of her shadow as she pulled out the crystal ball and told us that we were living in an unforgivable state of nescience and that she would be our saviour. In a mixture of heavily accented English and an assortment of alien tongues, she spoke of wars and sieges, betrayal and treachery … basically a whole lot of shit happenings through history. And me and Jen – we had been together through them all, she said. And then she said we always died together. At the hands of an insurmountable force. Our nemesis.

But so you see, forgetting the nemesis bit, this moment was half meant to be. Jen and I together, as we had been throughout history. Yes, so the woman was crazy. Incensed – driven mad by something in the water. But it made sense. It felt like it was right. We may be young and crazy, but … you know the feeling. Instinct spoke to us as one.

And then she warned us as we struggled to escape from the blackness of her silhouette – if we chose to remain together, then our nemesis would hunt and find us. We could avert that fate if we parted. Even at the end, we could do so and escape intact with our lives and all would be “forgiven” – her words.

We ran from her like we ran into this corner now. Though, a mile from her, we broke out in gasps and giggles before making out on a park bench wet with dew. Her white skirt and perfectly parted hair a total mess by the time that we were done. Perhaps we shocked a few old ladies in the process. Just so you know, that’s one of her turn-ons, offending people while engaging in some passionate act of love. Jen’s words. I’d just do whatever it would take to make her happy.