I was his coffin and he is mine. Even now I can feel his heart beating a two tone tympanic rhythm in my wrists and against my temples. His blood runs like a heat streak through my veins, cauterizing every last passion inside me until I turn black and crumble softly into a pile of ash and ebony dust. He takes a bloody finger and dips it in the powdered charcoal and draws a crude circle on the wall. Eternity. Bound. A lopsided manacle. The shapes of the planets. An eyeball. A bent crown. Ven diagrams sticky with clots and ash. A severed head.
"You and I, this is you and I," he whispers repeatedly, tracing his finger across the wall.
I kiss his hands and feet with smoky lips and bathe his hair with smouldering debris. He looks out across the reddened haze with lye tears dripping down his charred face. "Sadness. It's so sad. But look I am still laughing." He draws upturned edges on either side of his mouth with the bleeding finger stump and howls nervously as tears spatter like acid rain, eroding away his facial features. I am smiling and already forgetting what he looked like as I melt into a benign and gently undulating topographical map of the past, present and future.

We were meant for rejection.

D.C. al fine.