Fall Back

The darkened clouds stretched across the sky, hiding the sun from sight. Rain fell, washing away all that was left of the sorrows from man, littered on the ground as if it were nothing but unwanted garbage. Animals scurry to find a place to hide, wanting to keep warm and away from the cold autumn breeze and flittered through the air, accompanying the evening downpour. Trees swayed through the wind, their golden-red leaves falling and catching in the cool current to be carried off to new places they would wither, and in time, die and rot away.

She had sprung forward and fallen back all for him in his own warped sense of reality and time. She always believed that people who involved themselves with their precious lives, sitting, breathing, laughing and loving the days away were unable to fall back in memories, and only sprung forward to think of the future without regard for their current affairs. Their affairs progression was harder than those three words deemed more important to couples than an intimate bonding. The wind howled as though it were the reciprocated cries of her lost lover, and the soft pitter-patter of the drops against the window acted as the foreground to the everlasting illumination of the emotions embedded into the earth; whispers were carried by the wind to her fellow nobody. She listened to the wails of sodden souls crashing down to the earth.

The shadowy hand of death, ridden with dirt caressed her ghostly face, pale cheeks lighting up like fire, brighter than the star in the night sky. His fingers grazed her skin as her eyes burned with the passion and light of a thousand suns, burning brighter with every touch and every breath taken. Her thoughts blossomed like an apple on its rightful tree, spreading out to reach every angle; to touch every surface it could settle it's cold limbs against. Its leaves plummeted down to the soil wretched with the previously spoiled leaves once fresh and a crisp green, ready to fly and drift with the now cold wind. His hands grasped her own, desperately holding on to the lives they once dreamed of having, wished they owned together, but could never touch with their calloused and hard-worked hands. It had all been taken from under their stuck-up noses, caught up high in the cotton clouds. As she watched, he fell, rocking down to the bottom of the earth as she took a step back. To her in that moment, all thoughts had become foreign and her mind buzzed like the static of a television set. 'They don't understand a single thing.' That man was no longer behind her to whisper those wonderful sweet nothings into her ear; sweet nothings to be repeated to her significant other no longer present; a little white lie. That apple she had left on its branch had become rotten.

"It's nothing. Absolutely nothing; merely a fall back." Her last steps took her to the edge, and her eyes shut tightly as her last breaths gave birth to her last moments on the bricks that would give her that desired freedom. The wind swept her hair back as her body came crashing down to the earth, pushed; transmogrifying into the being Lucifer himself. That fleeting moment had been only a mere fall back, and a drawback from the harsh reality.

Author's Note

This is the short story version of my free verse poem of the same name. There is also a Sestina version of the poem, but I will not be uploading that.