His apartment towers above the clouds; heavy and angry, they merge into a single grey mass, threatening to burst into a downpour. Thunder roars in the distance—looming and gloomy, it fills the dark rooms. The skies weep over your loss, the disappearance he fabricated. Papers, digital documents, bold fonts, and cursive headers announce your dreadful death. You have been erased from the very ground he worshiped, like mist helpless against the rising sun.

You lash out at him—he’s in over his head, he’s unfair, he’s mean to you. But has he been, or was it you, always waltzing away just as he was about to pull you in? Lightning highlights the side of his face, and as menacing as he appears, he’s utterly vulnerable in his gentleness.

“What else do you want?” His lips brush your ear, and you struggle—trying to fly away like a reckless little bird, eager to soar higher above the stormy clouds. He’s only keeping you alive. “Our old house? I’ll repair it, and we’ll move in. Do you want something else? Just say the word.”

Was he truly the one who was unfair? Your fingers have crawled beneath his ribs, delicate digits of a cannibal; they’ve gnawed at his heart, ripped apart his aortas, and then retreated, as if they never tore through layer after layer. Patience is a virtue, but he has paid enough—and more than that. Every breath he has taken and will take belongs to you. It burst like a supernova, turning into a black hole. And it devours what is near—it consumes.

“Is that not enough for you?” he asks, aware of the shiver that courses like an electric shock through your body—thirsty and hungry, he revels in it. “Are you that blind, my dear? Look at this world, this wicked, cruel wasteland of endless suffering.”

Each word breaks another bone in your wings—a pathetic metaphor for your freedom, now bound in iron shackles. Rain pounds against the windows, howling in your ears like a lonely, wounded wolf. Wicked, wicked—two broken figures in the eye of the storm, equal in their madness.