A tainted white glove, shaded by years of festering contempt. That's all that remained of her touch. And even this was a welcome embrace on behalf of that last remnant of a fiery chuckle in her eyes. Whether that laughter came from felicity or pity it mattered not, for it still reminded him of how things used to be. A time when they lived in light of Camus and walked not in front nor behind the other, but humbly beside. A stride that had changed as had they, as he lifted her in front while claiming the lead. With his blank canvas above her, her laugh seemed to lighten her glare instead of her voice, and made him feel again like the object of a child's wonder.


He rubbed the tips of a blackened finger and tried to seize her stare. Eyes closing, he inhaled the scent of her presence and captured it but for a moment calling it "mine..." only to have it shatter by the visual thrust of a face that no longer smiles. From the wrinkles of long set dimples to the arch of cheek bones that once gave sound to that laugh, he finally took sight upon that glimmering sparkle, saw it begin to flicker, then fade. He pushed from the tips and pressed her darkened palm as he felt her too slip into the phantasmagoria of his desire.


To hold this moment, to light this flicking flame and preserve this perversion where reversion could no longer hold. And so it became that in his will to keep her she wilted away into that blank backdrop. The lines of her body absconded upon the easel, seaming themselves above. The sparkle now halted from time, and began to reflect in his own spark of smile until hers was but a brush stroke. What he felt was not the lifting grace of her pressure, but the violent tear of his possession; as if it were not a portrait he looked upon, but a mirror. As time passed away so did his desire as he looked passed the canvas and saw what he had done. Cast away in a Grecian Urn, forever outside his touch, the flames remained but she had not.


He lunged and tore at the portrait, scarring it with nails and scorns, and as quickly held it with remorse. Curling the fringes, but never touching the heart. He screamed in hopes that his words would tear through and bring depth to this lifeless lie. Then, bringing her down, his face pressed to hers, his abstaining tears echoing her mocking sparkle, he finally held her in a smudging embrace. And now that he touched her, he found that through the years her smile had never fled, but had been buried behind his own hardened mouth. Acquiescing to self-disgust rather than a hopeful hate for her, his tears now fled him too. Ones that dripped away his wrinkles and arches and palms and pasts of his portrait, until he felt his eyes again open and see all that was left; those same fiery eyes.


But where his smile should have been instead led to a sigh, acknowledging the lie he had told himself to get by. It was not pity or felicity, but mockery that made her shine. One that whispered an unwanted truth that no ties had ever strung her upon his blank canvas. Rather he had laid her there himself in as stagnant a stance, never to be held, unable to be touched. Her laughter but a plea of hopeless misery, begging to be let down. For it was not her contempt that held them apart, but the one he held for himself. The fire, a living breath of hope that one day she would be touched, now doused by his humility to hold her above himself. But in obligation to the bond he once felt so, he tried to rekindle the burning from long ago. Only to find that the happiness of now holding her died as quickly as had she when he looked down and found that she had let go. The gloves in his hands, and a smile having crawled across hers to her bright bare face.