There’s not a nightingale in the garden
whose heart is not burned by love

I love you but I don’t desire to fight against destiny. From time to time I will enjoy your memory, which will continuously alter me.

1. She shifts her weight so that her bag no longer jostles against her left hip. There is a streak of lipstick left on her teeth, but no one cares enough to tell her. Her heels won’t stop tapping. Her fingers hold onto her tickets as if they’re something that can save her. She is heading west, and only Ra can see.

(In two years time, she will no longer smile in any of her photos.)

2. As he buries his head into her freckled shoulder, he tells her that they look like stars. She kisses his cheek as she playfully asks “Will you follow me wherever I go?” 
“Yes,” he replies but the boy is a liar. 
He will be heading west before she does. 

3. She had meant to leave town three years ago, but here her body remains without her soul. (No matter how many times she stands at the mirror and practices, her smile is never real. Her lips are too tight, her eyes don’t shine. Maybe it’s because it washed off down the river with all the vinegar and salt. Maybe it’s because he took it. He’d always said that that smiles were made to give rather than to keep. If that was the case, then he must’ve given her all of his.) 

She pauses between waiting tables to wipe her sweaty brow and hides a scowl as a customer asks her to smile. (His laugh makes her skin crawl. She grinds her teeth to hold back her fangs as he stares at her skirt.) The sky is orange and tastes bitter in her mouth, as the eye of Ra sees it all (he knows she’ll never leave). 

4. A boy will always remember the colour of sky as he is told what he already knows. His skin has always been the colour of sickness, and Ra knows it. At night he dreams of drowning as he chases Ra’s barque into the darkness, before a serpent swallows him whole.

His body withers before his smile dissolves. Now he waits for Aphophis with open arms. 

5. There is a girl who prefers the black of the night to the colours of the sunset; because she hates watching the colours wane. She’d rather Aphophis eat his body whole, than slowly pick at the flesh on his bones. She’d rather be with the dead than the dying. 
This girl also hates who she’s become.

6. Her eyes look as though they have been painted with ink as she holds his hand. It has been a long time since she stopped believing that he could hear her, so she traces the bones underneath his skin instead, rather than filling the room with only her voice.  

7. She visits his grave often, but she doesn’t leave flowers; only letters with all the words that she could never say back then. She is now alive enough to accept sunsets for what they are, but her smile is something that will not easily be fixed. She tells him that she loves how the dawn feels against her skin because that means that she’s made it out of the belly of Aphophis yet again.

8.  If they’re headed west, Ra already knows the end.