Tunnel of Love

I find myself searching for closure in a forgotten cave, far from the hiking trail. Though your absence has led me to this unforgiving place, the window for preserving your essence is closing, and I will never find you in this crystal fissure of repose.

The cave proclaims its love in unconventional ways, just as the bats favor the dark in their intricate, nocturnal elegance. They reverberate with ancient songs from a realm that exists neither here nor there, in a language forged by Gaia herself. Each word was made with her complexity, but the sound did not carry here.

Captivated by memories of a sinister enigma that echoed off the walls, not even the bats could navigate through the sinking grotto forming in the tragedy of your mind. This damming cave of closure, once a tunnel of love, still holds our names engraved in the walls like scribbles on a tomb, always fated to crumble and close in on itself. I was the dweller immersed in the labyrinth of your life, and I knew the stakes as I delved deeper, searching for your diamond chamber.

I struggled with these unwinding tunnels, the same way you struggled to brush your thick brown locks once they too became tangled up in knots. You gazed into that bathroom mirror, enmeshed in a hazy, dream-like trance. The exact way your eyes worked on me, only this time, your pupils were dissipated, and your sleepy eyes were laced with goodbye. Those same eyes formed tears that watered the rutilated quartz growing in the corners of your eyes as you grew drowsy, but you remained restless all through the night.

This was the loudest memory in this cave, and it shook the walls and tormented the bats. The Earth tremored beneath me as if lightning were striking Zeus himself, catching me off guard. The ground trembled like a sinner in church, and it struck with a blood-thirsty vengeance like a trigger-happy rifle shooting off into oblivion.

I knew that I stood on the edge of a catalyst. I felt the violence in resonance, and I clung to my knees like a child. The floor beneath me fell apart the same way I did when the news of your absence overtook me like a landslide of bodies from a hillside cemetery. Faceted diamonds shot up from the soil like hands reaching toward the sky during the time of the rapture. This was the apocalypse I feared the most, and it wasn't the end of this world that terrified me, but that you were mine.

Memories haunt these tunnels of when you hit your head against that bathroom mirror that you spent hours gazing into, and the glass shattered around you like the diamonds at the bottom of this keep. The tunnels you created in your dreams collapsed the moment your body met the ground of that cold bathroom floor.

The night you couldn't sleep at all was the last time you had the most.

The stalactites suspended above me like a crystal chandelier came crashing down, and I wasn't ready for the sound. Cupid shot his arrows that night in the tunnel of love, piercing through my heart, and turning white diamonds into rubies and garnets.