Prose: "shroud"

When I first realised that he ran away to where nobody would ever find him, I was curiously apathetic. I didn't move, didn't even blink, I don't think, just moved back to the bathroom mirror and kept applying my eyeliner, finally with a careless, practised hand that I didn't even know I'd been developing over the past year or so.

Softsmudging black on the translucent pale of my eyelids. It wasn't until I was applying the line beneath my eyes that I realised it was streaking down my face along with tears. I hadn't realised I was crying. I stared at myself in the mirror and watched myself cry, as if I wasn't in my body, or as whoever was actually in my body and was crying was a complete stranger to me. I think I dropped the pencil on the floor. Someone asked me if I was all right, someone picked up the fallen pencil, someone's hands were on my shoulders, but I wasn't there any more.

I don't know where I was. With him, maybe. Maybe by running so far away that no one would be able to follow him, I could end up finding him, for the final time in my life.

*

Beautiful little deer boy, a faun. He had eyes the same colour as my own, dark and wide, but towards the end, his became sadder than mine could ever be -- or that's how I thought they seemed, anyway. His smile was soft and cheeky and beautiful. He stopped smiling towards the end of things.

I thought he was getting better. I was wrong.

My beautiful little faun with the scars on his arms, all self-inflicted, burns, cuts, and bruises. When I'd first seen them I'd pretended I didn't, the second time I seized his arm in my hands and pulled it towards me. I ran my right index finger over the marred skin as he held his breath.

"It's fucking pathetic," he said.

"It's sad," I replied, and drew my own sleeve up my arm. His eyes grew glassy and huger than ever when he saw my physical manifestations of the plaguing misery. "It's just sad. It makes me sad."

"Can't stop?"

"It's the only relief there is. The numbness that comes afterwards saves me."

"Me too."

I'd gotten mocked for it -- someone called me "Professor Slitwrist" to my face, and after that, humiliated, I tried not to do it. There was so much pain, though. When I beat my head against the wall, the dull throbbing thud was something entirely different to flesh parting beneath a blade. I thought I'd found the solution, until I ended up with concussion. The headache was blinding, and the vomiting was like something out of a nightmare or a Stephen King novel.

Beneath the knife, there was always blood, and always scars. But it seemed less painful, and that was the point. Less pain, not more. I'd gone back to my Stanley knife and my older brother's hobby lancet. As the blood seeped out, so did the pain. And I began wearing long sleeves almost constantly. I didn't like the way my fat arms looked in short sleeves, anyway.

"Bad, bad, bad idea," he'd murmured after I told him, smoothing my hair back and ghosting his lips across my forehead, the touch as cool and smooth as rice paper. "Some things are safer than others."

I only saw -- almost saw -- him burn himself with a cigarette once. I can't remember what we were talking about. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. I saw his eyes become heavier and his shoulders shift uncomfortably as if being in his own body pained him. Maybe it did. He took a deep drag from his cigarette and lowered the glowing tip towards his arm.

"Faun, no," I'd blurted out, my heart thrumming against my ribcage like a trapped butterfly, my stomach twisting itself around the spike of ice that suddenly appeared. "Please. Please don't. It hurts."

I didn't know what I meant, whether it hurt me or it hurt him or it was just a painful thing to do in general. He'd turned his huge doe eyes on me, hesitating, and then, with the merest hint of a shiver going through him, stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray.

"Okay," he'd said, and his voice was very soft, and very, very gentle. I hadn't realised how close I had been to crying until I gave him a watery smile in thanks and threaded my fingers through his. Swallowing hard, feeling his skin on my own and wondering what we'd end up doing with ourselves. Would this go on forever until we destroyed each other?

Despite my tears I wasn't too horrified by that idea. If anything, I was comforted by it.

*

But it didn't go on forever, because there was no forever any more. He was gone, and there was nothing else to it. No comfort, just a loneliness that was so sudden and so violent that it almost left physical bruises on it. My sad faun ran away. He ran further than I could ever follow. I was too numb and too sad to consider killing myself, too sad to cry, staring into the future and being caught in a grey heavy cumulo-nimbus of heady misery and lostness.

They found a letter on his writing desk, an A4 piece of paper with three words scribbled onto it: I love you.

"Of course it was for you," Violet said to me. She was looking at me incredulously, as if I'd grown another head; I'd asked if he could have possibly left it with me in mind. "Who else would he say that to?"

Was that what they thought of him? That he was just a miserable fuck with nothing and no one of value in his life except his weird emo girlfriend? It was so untrue. There was love in that boy that could have stilled wars, or started them. He held so many people precious to him. The only person who wasn't precious to him was the man in the mirror. But he was precious to me. He broke my heart.

"He spoke so often of you," his mother said to me, at the funeral. She had given me the once over, and her red-rimmed eyes widened when they returned to my face. "Your eyes... your eyes are so like his."

Were so like his, I wanted to say, but of course I didn't.

It was a closed casket funeral. I don't know what happened during it, what the celebrant said or what anyone else said. I just stared at the pine box and thought, he's in there. His huge doe eyes and his scars and his lovely smile and everything. Everything in there. Something's gone lost.

The violent part of the sadness didn't hit me until after he'd been put in the hearse. I felt Leah, or possibly Violet, grasp my hand as she sobbed next to me, and they closed the door. Suddenly it was all too real, and I walked calmly to the bathroom, where I locked the door, sank to the floor, and sobbed until I coughed up blood.

I love you.

Liar, I thought. You fucking liar. If you loved me, you never would have left me to be all alone with this. The scars on my left arm were throbbing with phantom pain, although I had been too sad for the last week to even think of touching a blade.

*

Your eyes are so like his.

I spent hours and hours staring into my mirror, staring into my own eyes. The more I concentrated, the less they were my eyes, and the more they became his. Dark, huge, deerlike eyes. My poor sad lost faun, run away where I could never find him again, where I could never tell him that it was okay to be sad because I could be sad with him, and that was so much better than being sad alone.

The winter sunlight poured into my bedroom, and I stared and stared.

"I miss you," I whispered to the watery reflection in the mirror. I didn't concentrate on anything but my eyes, so it was almost like I was gazing at him, and not at myself. Where I was sharp and awkward-featured, he had been classically beautiful. But the longer I stared, the more my eyes became his. Ours.

I kept a glass vase of white roses on the vanity where I was sitting. They were dying, now, gently dropping once-white petals, curled at the edges with a sepia tone. Running my fingers over a fallen petal, I remembered how it felt to run my finger across the scars upon his arm, the softness and almost vulnerability of the skin, the evidence of where he chased the pain away. My skin was so pale, and healed so well, that people only saw my scars if I showed them to them. White on white. He hadn't been so lucky. It was obvious he had hurt himself. The cigarette burns especially.

"I miss you," I whispered to the mirror again, white petals crushed in my palm, entranced by my own eyes -- his eyes. "I love you, too. I love you, too. So much. Why did you run away? I could have told you. I could have told you everything. We wouldn't be...we wouldn't..."

The images swam in front of my face, and the tears raced down my cheeks as I closed my eyes. Against the truth. There were only my eyes in the mirror. His would never be there again.

I love you.