Twenty-Twenty-One
Elizabeth Fasone
It was easy to think I'd lost you,
Out in that blackness –
That darkness that wasn't rich,
Wasn't deep,
But was stifling and empty,
Cold if it had any temperature at all.
The years of illness, loss and grief,
Were determined to come on and on,
An unrelenting storm,
Impassible and great.
Perhaps greater than us.
I fell away from you,
From the black rage that swirled within you,
The static of your angry grief,
As coffee cups and other small objects
Flew around you, putting holes in the walls.
I shrank and withdrew, into my own
Weaknesses and echoing emptiness.
It wasn't all at once,
And it wasn't without Help,
But in the dark vacancy those years left,
Somehow came the light touching of fingertips.
And I emerged from great blankness
To your familiar wilderness,
Baked and scarred and shattered up to the heart of it,
But familiar
And mine.
And as schisms heal to scars,
We bless the quiet moments that come
Between tempests,
Each pretending we don't keep one eye
On the horizon.
About the Author
Elizabeth Fasone is from San Diego and now lives in Pittsburgh with her husband their two dogs. She has worked in art and technology for fifteen years and runs a web design and graphic design business.
She primarily writes science fiction and flash fiction. Writers she goes back to get her bearings include Bashō, Iain Banks, Shirley Jackson, Gail carriger, Brandon Sanderson, Kurt Vonnegut, T.H. White, William Goldman, Margaret Atwood, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
She has collaborated on creative projects, writing scripts for plays and animated shorts, as well as contirbuting to a documentary. She previously wrote for school and university papers, was published in university anthologies, and wrote for Patch.com.