I Will Write No More

As he closed the notebook, the weight of the cover pushed the air raising dust. He coughed, and then took a drink of some rotting wine to sooth his throat.

The only light in the room poured in from large smoke-stained windows. Ancient city views all around. He couldn’t remember moving here. He had always just lived in this place. Like waking up with a hangover after a big party the night before that had changed his life or something.

He exhaled smoke into the shadows of antiques sitting on shelves, rugs and wood floors, stone walls, a tapestry of a foreign war before guns.

He inhaled smoke into his lungs, the action lifting him from his chair that creaked with the effort of movement. He walked to a large window looking toward the east and Moldova. Mercedes lived there. He still loved her thinking of the mist from the gray gothic city as the steam from her warmth on a snowy train platform; her blonde hair curling over the fur coat with eyes like melting ice. On that day he decided to marry her in order to keep her at his side forever.

He continued to smoke his cigarette letting these thoughts engulf his mind. One thought from many different lives.

He turned around. And began to pace to the other side of the room along the Persian rug. Once again, only the stained sunlight lit the room in the shape of the windows, like a Dali painting. The light, square boxes that extended to the wall or the floor cutting shapes in the furniture, the contrast made the shadows empty voids.

He passed his writing desk wondering where this story would lead him. He had wanted to find inspiration in this penthouse. The kestrel helped. That bird hid a metaphor. Only for what or for whom in the story he still had not decided. He would need to finish it first and hash it all out in the editing process.

He took another drag from the cigarette.

He passed the fireplace still clean from the summer of disservice. Wood stacked for a change in temperature. Global warming, or what Americans called an “Indian Summer”? Still warm for September. He liked that he wrote the story to go along with the current date in which he lived, only the year didn’t match.

He continued to the window looking toward the west and Amsterdam. The cigarette half smoked, he knocked off some ash in the ashtray, most of the ash already on the floor somewhere.

Amsterdam, that’s where he’d lost Mercedes in a drug filled haze of a disco-tech. They’d each gone somewhere else with different people. They’re paths not meant to cross again. If only they’d been simple village people instead of world travelers.

Mercedes, the Ukrainian once again filling his mind with the fond memories of young love on warm spring nights with money and friends unleashed on European cities in exploration of what it meant to be alive. Mercedes looking over her shoulder as she held his hand pulling them both into the sunlight. Smiles and a jovial feeling for a new day on Earth.

That’s how it all started with Mercedes, the love of his life. Yet somehow the nights became longer as the dependency on alcohol and fleeting friendships meant more than a life of love on the run. They had been pulled into the gravity of other like themselves making them all feel common. Now he spent his time alone in a penthouse writing about these ghosts in his memory while she spent her time out there living with others as she had once lived with him.

These thoughts made it impossible for him to write.

The End