The Purity of Snow

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  "Moments when I felt like, the two of us were somehow preventing the universe from descending into heat death. We were the fever in a cold city. We were furnace; lovers' breath taking chimney stack flight into the frigid blue above." 

  The poetry doesn't come easily to him anymore. That lucidity has evaporated. But it's more than just that though. When he was in her presence, the world felt like a provocation, a vibrant thing in constant flux. Now he feels the cold railings as he navigates his way down into the bowels of the city, its metro system, and he feels the world to be only a terminal being, feels like he treads upon the visage of a dying creature with pallid skin and brittle bones. Something that threatens to become inert. Static. 
  Two weeks back. Clutter on the kitchen counters again - a veritable skyline of plates upon plates, cathedral domes of upturned bowls. Food stains of spaghetti red, brown rings from vanished mugs, the inadvertent art quietly created as a by-product of living. 
  Her ire. He knows he's pushed it too far this time. His bohemian habits - not innate but cultivated in order to affect the image of someone carefree, someone that knows how to live with abandon - are not so charming now in the fourth year of their cohabitation. She sees the industry with which he sets about his creative endeavours. The zeal with which he will scrawl and scribble his poems and stories upon any surface as yet uncovered... envelopes, notepads, napkins. The way he will lurk in the studio loft of their apartment long into the early hours of the morning over an easel, painting. And she wonders why some of this frenzied energy can't - "FOR F**K SAKE" - be diverted towards the pots. 
  "Just. This. Once." 
  1 : "He's kind of cute." 2 : "The dude with the long hair and warn out jeans?" 1 : "Don't you think?" 2 : "But he never f*****g talks though. To anybody. Well, actually, that's not true, Cassie says she's seen him talking to himself. I bet the dude's a Grade A f*****g narcissist. Aloof and married to his art. The dude also commutes. Like, you're in your 20s. And you're purposefully out in the sticks, like some kind of Buddhist monk, pretentious assh-." 1 : "Hey! Why'd you always have to go on a tirade like that? You're such a b***h sometimes 2 ." 
  Many years back. "You having some trouble there?" 
  Her decrepit car of tin can grey is a wheezing mess of shoddy components seemingly unable to sing in the harmony necessary to produce movement. She has seen him before in class. But she hasn't really seen him before. His broad chest, the way he towers over her in spite of his abysmal posture (that leads her to speculate gravity somehow singles him out for a more acute dose of punishment than the rest... that it acts differently upon him in some way). "Oh, so he does speak" - an inaudible whisper. 
  He pats her car as though it were a horse afflicted with an illness. As though human care and attention could mend this beast of bolts and pistons and cables and carburettors, an anatomy with which she is not familiar in the slightest. She will later go on to remark: "I swear, that behaviour from anyone else, I'd find creepy and cringe, but he just had a certain way about him. Simultaneously sweet and confident. Brash and meek. Awkward yet really charming." 
  It doesn't take her long to fall in love. She remembers being in the outhouse with him one spring morning. The air sharp and fresh. His features radiate enthusiasm as he guides her from one sketch to the next. Like an over-eager tour guide, he is a verbal eruption, a blizzard of words so intense she is almost snow blind. The white wall. She feels scared. Wants to tell him to stop, that he's inundating her, but his excitement is so visceral, so forceful, she feels like he may break, if he does not purge himself of this need. 
  Then it happens. Looking back, she knew from this moment, her life would spiral into ecstasy; she did not, however, anticipate the agony that would be inextricably wed to it. 
  "This is my latest work. I know it's not quite right. Not quite right just yet. But, it's an important subject matter. It terrifies me, the way so many people just walk passed the homeless. The way they've come to occupy this other space. They live in a city within a city. An ecosystem that we've imposed upon them. And we neglect to see them, elect not to see their worlds. Because the moment we see them, we validate them and their pain. We restore their humanity. And we'd have to question what we've consigned them to. So you can't look. And that's why I've been drawing them. To restore them. To our consciousness. To try and give them back a bit of humanity by pencil. By paper." 
  The face confronting her, staring back at her from the paper is so hauntingly beautiful, she is almost tempted to project these features onto him. He has painstakingly rendered every whisker, lovingly capturing the matchbox chin and neck. The eyes, receding as they do, speak of pain and horror, the howling madness of nights spent shrieking at imaginary figures (the product of a drug induced hallucination). Yet the speck of light gleaming off of them tells a different story, one of hope that transcends the misery of the cold, the wind, the paranoia and the ignorance. It tells of a time of childhood, a mother's kiss and the belief that everything might be alright. That things could still be redeemed.
  The first night of their love making in the bed that's too small. And how clumsy he is with her, struggling to remove her clothes. More out of nervousness than a lack of coordination or prowess. The way the intimacy makes up for the quick ending. How he cherishes her afterwards, slowly savouring each part of her body, a lavish helping of kisses for every spot of flesh. This boy is all veneration and worship, investing everything in what is in front of him. Trying so hard to be a conduit for a type of divinity she cannot yet fathom or appreciate. Trying to protect what matters in the world. Labouring to save everything from the atrophying forces of cynicism and negativity. He is the purity of snow. 
  "So why do I F*****G hate you so much now?!" She is weeping. And smashing the dirt covered plates. And her eyes burn with confusion and death. And she wants to eviscerate the younger version of herself that gave in so easily. To smash that naivety like she's smashing the kitchenware. 
END OF PART 1.