Ajar

Edge of Humanity Magazine

9 months ago

My door ajar, texts scampered in as if they were parcel tongues slithering in. They were powerful like the moon, my canine heart howled melancholic blues. Emerald eyes filled my mind, again, a single sentence brought back what once had been.

Yet what had been to me was not what had been to you. Months between us, I felt cold winds blowing past old avenues. Dim were those nights, and only the gaslit lanterns showed a way. A single parcel through my slotted door, like a prisoner given an overdue post, but there you broke me the news.

A sailor at sea, I left my maiden to a world of hustlers and thieves. Those soul-sucking, manipulating and conniving fiends, had I shown her the world, she’d be beyond reprieve. Yet Wendy wept a woeful tale, of lions in dens and parasites in her hair. My door ajar, words pushed air in my heart’s tattered sails.

A parcel was all you gave me! Even when I tried to make amends, when my door opened to let my ghosts in, it was then Wendy, you disappeared. Your pain on my mind and lingering in dread, how your final words scarred my face every-time I looked in the mirror.

A year in a funhouse, where among those reflected broken faces that contorted and twisted and cringed and raged, I walked towards the bristled and broken murmurs of my own echoes in search of your face. Silent Wendy, you left me in the quiet of Neverland. You gave me a glance and then stole it away. I even forgot how to fly.

I left my soul ajar, and waited like those ancient big eyed statues, the ones from your ancestral home. That romantic fool who read too many Victorian books, I waited at each train station, learned every code of morse. A lover become beggar, a person become ghost. I thought you my Juliet, my beloved Isolde, but time changes everything, even the opening of a door.

Text © Samson Mousa