Frozen in place, I stood there as if time itself had stopped, while the poem was fixated on me. Never in my life had I felt such insignificance in my own existence.
While my desires and admirations were fighting over what was left of me, his face was expressionless. The eyes that harbored the warmest of my feelings were cold, like those of a killer.
Ella didn’t know any other way to love than obsessively, religiously, and with a fiery passion. The kind that could make you shiver when her fingers brushed against your skin. And she would pray down on her knees to twirl you around her finger, to make you stay longer than you anticipated, and to give you a little more love in the hope that you would return it. To her, there were no limitations. She would give away her skin if a man she loved needed it. You could say that every man that ever laid his hands on her was a God she had to worship to reach the pearly gates.
This night was like many others. She was preparing her space to write poetry. It was as if she was preparing to worship a God of a sort – with a bottle of Shiraz on the table and Chopin on the recorder, she set orange and cinnamon-scented candles up in her room.
It wasn’t that she didn’t know that he wasn’t good for her or that he would never stay the night. It was that she had hope. She believed that in the depths of his heart, he had loved her all along, and one day he would choose her. The hope kept her eyes in a protective pink film every time she looked at his face. And all she wished for was to lay in his arms and to wake up to him stroking her hair.
He sat across from her on the train he took every day to work and back. Never had he seen her before, and there was nothing else that he could do than sit there, staring at her drawing while being perplexed by her beauty. He himself had never drawn before, or maybe he did when he was still in kindergarten and just forgot how much he enjoyed it.
With her fingers lightly gripping the quill, the black ink smeared on her fingers and across the paper, if I may paint her clumsiness and lack of etiquette, she tried to write him another letter. But what was there for her to write about? After all, they had never met. She had seen him once from the crowd as she watched his fingers dance across the keys of a pianoforte while clutching her mother’s hand to calm her nerves.
The smell of cinnamon in the room, a burnt candle on the bedside table, an empty bottle of Shiraz on the floor beside the ivory bed, and finally… a lady clutching onto a tattered book while tangled in her silken sheets with a tear running down her cheek.
I prayed that the wooden floorboards wouldn’t creak under my weight as I got out of the bed, because God knows that hell had no fury like her majesty awoken suddenly from her slumber.
She could feel that something was wrong with the way the wind made her skin crawl as she teetered out from the bar onto the small alleyway leading to her home and she felt almost as if there, in the dark, were a pair of eyes watching her every move.
At night, when Ember lies down in her bed and listens to the rain softly running down her skylights she travels the worlds unknown to men.
Tonight was no exception; she was running in a maze to find her prince, a man she hardly knew but a face he had.
This website is proudly hosted with Dreamhost — a reliable, beginner-friendly hosting service I genuinely recommend. If you’re thinking of starting your own website, using [my affiliate link on the left] not only helps you get started but also supports my work, as I’ll earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for being a part of this journey!
