~She walks everyday through the streets of New Orleans
The street where she walks is dappled with splotches of light, where the streetlights still glow. Distant, perhaps, are the sounds of a modern city, but here on the residential street there are only crickets and the irregular beat of her footsteps. The breeze of her motion pulls her hair, loose to the knees and unnaturally bloody in the streetlights, away from her face. Sometimes she lifts her eyes to the narrow crescent of the moon, sliding through the leaves of the trees overhead.
~I must love what I destroy, and destroy the thing I love
It’s midnight, the witching hour, but her thoughts won’t let her rest. It’s the old nightmare, new again since she came here. She walks faster, but can’t escape. Fiercely, softly, she says, “I don’t miss you,” but it’s a lie. If she says it enough she might believe it. She doesn’t realise she’s stopped, is clutching someone’s wrought iron fence in a deathgrip. “Was I not good enough?” But the person she’s talking to isn’t there.
Someone else is, though. She didn’t notice them, in the shadows, in the dark.