Author's Note: A few things to clear up. I wrote this in 40 minutes at my writing group for school with the prompt of "Together". As for the characters, they don't have names because I couldn't think of any and this has only been edited a little. They're both male, in case that was confusing or anything. I decided to make it vague and leave open ends so I purposely didn't fill everything in and the stuff that the reader doesn't know is left to the imagination. I haven't done anything or posted anything prose in a long time, so do your worst.
The trees are skeletons now. Their hands reach up to the sky and try to touch the vague boundary line of the atmosphere. Their hands are slender, bruised and callused and crooked with fingers dangling and I watch the leaves go by. I watch them drift to the ground and the wind cradles them to their death and what evaporated into the air was their final breaths.
I am sitting under a tree on the park bench beside him. We don't speak words and the silence speaks for us and I would like to say that together we are braving the wind but it's stupid to sit in the cold when you can be inside. In the cold like it is a house, a roof lingering over our heads. It is a house of cards that will be knocked down by the breeze and the only one blowing houses down is his parents.
I work up the courage to speak to him and it ends up not being courage, the words just slip off of my chapped lips. "Sorry, I just." my words stop and start like a bus, picking up thoughts and dropping them back off even if I do not want to think of them and even if I don't want them to leave. "I don't know how to talk to you and I'm sorry." my voice is weak because I am weak.
He nods and understands and I want him to do more than just to nod and understand and I can't understand
him.
I can tell he is cold but I don't mention it and hold it in.
It starts to snow and the snowflakes land on my glasses, on my lips. They melt. I see him watching a group of people shovel leaves and dead twigs into a large bin. He takes out his lighter and flashes it under it hand, the fire lightly wavers back and forth. He walks over and joins them. They can't seem to get the fire started. He lights the top twig and drops his lighter into the bin. A faint echo comes from the bottom and I watch the fire engulf the can and they raise their near frostbit hands to it. The same lighter used to light his cigarettes, and sometimes mine.
I briefly smile and walk over to him, gently pressing my head against his back in between his shoulder blades. Ashes from the fire scatter in the air and I stand back trying to catch them on my lips. I expect them to taste like snowflakes but all they taste is bitter and I understand them.
Out of his hands he drops a cigarette onto the sidewalk. I know this because he had none to share earlier in the day. He crushes it with his heel and I know it can't be that easy and I know that it won't be that easy. I would still graduate high school but I don't know about him. And I know that tomorrow the trees will still be skeletons and the leaves will be on the ground but maybe the snow will cover that. If it does it will still be underneath and I will still be here and he will still be.
"What're you going to do now?" I ask him. The words drift in the air like dandelion seeds or crumbled leaves to travel by the wind and by way of clothing.
"I don't know." he says, "I don't want to finish school anymore, but maybe I'll try again." he stands on his heels and I know that he wouldn't like it and I knew that he wouldn't stay there from the start.
Still, I say, trying to imbue what is false hope, "Yeah, you should try."
I can feel my shoes on the pavement and we watch the cars go by. Their headlights stare down the road making a path of light that rebounds off the street. It's starting to get dark outside and the blanket of the night will be placed over our heads soon enough. I watch. We watch the people go by. They come and disappear but we stay in the small circumference of space and breathing air we created around us.
I breathe his air and he breathes mine, in through my lungs, through my body, and back out. I would like to call it our air but you can't own the thing that slips through your fingers. Trapping his breath into a bottle or jar wouldn't do any good when it would escape when the lid comes back off. Nothing is mine though he tells me quietly that he is mine. It's no use when everything and everyone will decompose.
The thoughts are invading my head again, forcing their way in through cracks and crevices. I bring myself back. At least for now I can call him mine and later doesn't exist because our existence is a single breath and it is never the future that they tell me about.
He looks at me and our eyes gloss over each other and I feel the brief moment when they touch. When our pupils dilate to meet the sun that is slowly descending in the sky. He understands me without words and I understand him bu watching his body language and how his eyes shift in their sockets. "It's getting dark." I say, not much of an observation. My words are few to meet his.
"You should go home." he says. His words linger in the air by the trees like the snowflakes and the ashes. Lightly, I wrap my arms around him and I leave. I want to say that we're together, but this won't exactly be.
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