My hands still wear the frosty veil, too ashamed to feel warmth again. Like a bride left to perish, left incapable of remembering what her face was once like. Every grain still mingles in the past. Only a meatless skeleton left to face today. It clinks and clanks as the world thrusts itself at bones of cloud. Wind chimes echo inside me. The pores that bear my name breathe prayer. So intent on forcing the memory through a sieve.  But my own desperate force reverberates back onto me. It slithers up my senses, an inexhaustible phantom of a caress. Every touch with the intangible rips a layer of skin from me. 
How can I be strong when my body’s dispersing out of reach?
I don’t want an answer. Nor the hope braided into it either. One of us has to leave. Then there’s nothing I can fear. Except, that I might not care if it’s me.
Those iron arms, icy as if drenched with lifeless blood. All I can see is how they manacled my hips.  How they tainted me with afflicting fingerprints. I can’t forget. Your eyes didn’t skim my own before you dragged me into your uncompassionate stare. The vessels of my heart, wrapped around your fingers like rings.
My body recoiled from itself, detesting me more than you. Yet I couldn’t move, smothered by apprehensions meaningless now. Sense had collapsed under the thrill. Just as the sun had given into the stars. It was now my lips’ turn to surrender to the burglary.
But if only I had, if I’d glanced back at the trail of regret, where I’d stood seconds before it all, I have no doubt what I would have seen. A crude hole in the midst of a flourishing garden. A savagely empty tunnel where a flower had once been.
Though I can’t help myself but ask, what does it matter if your lips found themselves in? I can’t denounce you. I, alone, had been the one to forget that a lock comes with only one key. And that blind impatience would never take its place.
Even then there was nothing left to guard. The crystal walls that had blanketed my soul. All that’s left of them are scattered pieces, crushed by my reckless hurry. I can feel the merciless of the sharp cracks. Piercing into my conscience, leaving a hole large enough for your memory to flood back.
Time alone can fertilize a slaughtered flower. Haste today is wait tomorrow. Close your eyes and count to ten. For only time assuages the past.