The kids from yesterday

The thirst never bothered us in the desert – water wasn’t what we were parched for, and after so many days passed without the glare of the sun on necrotic flesh, a little singe around the edges was almost welcome. Anything, these days, to feel warm, a brief flash of heat in between so much ice.

The engine splutters, the gasoline hissing its last as the car – our car, one of dozens – rolled to a lazy stop, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, between other nowheres we’d seen all too many times, in too many iterations to count. The cities changed all the time – small townships became cookie-cutter suburbia, became heaving metropolis with not enough air to consume but more than enough flesh and blood to keep us sated. In a place like that, nobody noticed bodies being swept from the crush of a nightclub, lured back to an alley way to be discarded, living on only in bloated fullness that sits like a reservoir in our guts, swelled like the parasites we are.

In the desert, the hunger gnaws, but the maddening bloodlust sparks passion, a fixed clarity. I lay with you under the stars, your eyes wide and dark as you stare upwards, sharp jaw and aquiline nose carving crevices into the fabric of the evening sky. It’s the hunger talking when I feel my hand draw towards your wrist, bringing its bird-delicate form to my mouth for a soft, sweep of a kiss; the desperation to consume flares angrily in my gut as I realise that I’ll leave you after this. Perhaps not tonight, with the crickets in our ears and the weight of humid desert heat in our lungs – but soon. There’s a peace that comes with knowing that; in the life of an immortal, knowing that something precious will have a date scrawled on its tombstone makes me feel a little human. I am once again in my first decades of this life of night, stumbling through the deaths of my parents, my siblings, my first wife, my children, the grandchildren I never met. But soon the calm makes way for terror – my body, unused to grief after so many decades, shifts awkwardly around the feeling, trapping it beneath my ribs, pushing my organs down, squeezing them until they feel like they may burst. My face finds the dip of your neck as I take a shaking breath; your scent comforts for a moment, then burns as the ache grows worse. My mind flits through denial, anger, bargaining, hopelessness, all in the time it takes for you to lift your hand to my hair in that way that’s become familiar, your lips – cracked and dry from heat and thirst – finding the skin of my forehead.
For a moment I’m calm, though the world still sways hazily through tears.

              “Do you remember,” you murmur, words lilted by the accent I can no longer place; some civilisation that has, I presume, ceased to exist in our absence, “that night by the docks? The full moon?”
The rolodex of memory you’re asking me to lift from is several centuries thick – and yet I know the night you mean instantly. Were I able to blush, my cheeks would flood red and illuminate me for a moment, a marionette of something not yet dead. I kiss your skin softly as I nod, my arm finding your waist and tugging you closer.

              “You know I do,” I mumble when I realise you’re still waiting for a reply. So much of our communication is wordless these days, it feels novel to speak in full sentences. It feels like we’re kids again, fresh children of the night, bloodstained and sated, unafraid, so sure that this would last forever.

              “If I tried hard enough, I think I could remember all my nights with you. Even the ones where we did nothing at all. It’s like they’re still happening, like I can close my eyes and go back to that place and just be with you.”

              “Very Vonnegut of you,” I mumble, smiling even though I don’t feel it. It’s become easy for me, parrying my emotions away like this. We once had a saying about not borrowing grief from tomorrow – but tomorrow is almost here, and the grief is tapping its beak insistently against my window.

Nevermore, nevermore…

              “I just wanted you to know that I’ll find you there,” you say after a moment, allowing me my few seconds of cynicism. You hate this about me, the way I dodge emotions like bullets – but you’ve come to take it as a condition of loving me, knowing that if I feel I’ll fall apart. Especially now, with the sun beginning its glimmer over the horizon. When you speak again your voice shakes, and I close my eyes, still avoiding, still pretending not to know,
“I’ll find you in those memories, I’ll go back and look for you, and I’ll press my lips together so you don’t know how it ends.”

              “If you went back,” I say slowly, tracing your collarbone with the tip of my finger, “you could run. Don’t approach me at that bar, don’t ask me to walk you home. You could save us both.”

              “I probably could,” you muse, your voice soft. Your tone is flat, like I just suggested something too absurd to entertain. Perhaps I did.

The sun splashes gold over the sand now, its dagger-sharp heat already beginning to make my limbs ache, my mouth cracking as I part my lips. There’s a temptation to stay here, to wrap myself up in you and allow this star to turn us to dust, to blow our pieces into the air, scattering us across the world, permanently embedding us into the soil of the places we’ve haunted.

You turn your face towards me, a wicked light in your eyes despite your exhaustion. We’ll move in a moment, bones aching and skin tearing as we lift ourselves from the ground. But for now, the pain is welcome, the sun is bright, and I can pretend this will last forever.