Chernobyl Autumn

The days grow shorter and the nights longer. It is coat weather now. Dead leaves blanket the ground and chill winds pierce my soul like a dagger sliding between a heavy set of ribs. Once upon a time I loved all of this, these changes, as I loved to breathe. As I loved to live. As I loved you. We’d spend these cool nights together hand in hand exploring the streets admiring the myriad of warm hues painstakingly brushed on every "happy" tree. You'd tell me stories from when you were a little girl growing up in Moscow. And I'd listen savoring every word as though each word were some chocolate-coated delicacy. Those same trees have now lost their brilliant luster, color, and feeling. Now autumn is nothing more to me than a series of monotonous months spent alone in quiet contemplation and solitude; in hibernation. I walk the streets alone now in the vain hope I may somehow clear my head, but it grows intolerably cold and everywhere I turn I see you. I keep catching glimpses in my peripheral vision of you playfully tossing leaves at me resplendent in your mittens and matching stocking cap. I can see my breath and in my breath I see your crooked smile. And if I pause and carefully watch, the inevitable march of approaching frost.

I need a drink – a momentary fix. I duck into a dive bar, any dive bar… a hole in the wall corner joint where “everybody knows your name.” The place is dark and empty and the jukebox belts out a sad tune. I pull up a stool and instruct the barkeep to bring me whiskey and keep it coming. I lose track of time and space as I sit and drink. I crawl into my memories; a dank fox-hole buried six feet down in freezing ground. I need this, the drink, so I may dream. Because it is when we dream, we may sojourn with the dead. When I sleep, everything remains somehow unchanged and homeostatic between us and you’re clean, fuck, we both are, so young and full of life. See, the reason I shoot up or hit the bottle is so I may remain forever in this dream… in this deep, deep sleep, even while I am awake. And maybe I’m a fucking coward for choosing to do this, too afraid to deal with life or play the shitty hand fate has dealt me, but it is what it is and I am who I am.

And we are what we always were, frozen in time. So blissfully happy and in love…

You know, when I was young I remember I’d stand in the bathroom with the lights out in the blacker than black, staring intently into the mirror waiting… waiting for a face to materialize, a ghost perhaps, or bloody Mary queen of Scots. As I sit in this quiet bar, twenty years later, blankly staring at flashing neon, wrapped in my darkness, I still patiently wait, but now I wait for your face only so I may reach out and caress your black hair just once…

I slam shot after shot of whiskey. Every shot leads me one step closer to oblivion. I hear a voice beckon me across the expansive ocean of time… a feint whisper behind a crumbling wall somewhere in far-off Elysium. I drift ever closer. And I feel the wheat briskly brush against my thigh... closer. And underneath my tongue lies a coin of copper so I may pay Charon his fare.