Rachel:
It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face.
"Nicolas!" His name escaped my mouth with a gust of breath before I can swallow it. Stuck forever behind my eyelids, his face loomed luminously in the dark. Dark curls caught in a silk ribbon, the soft brown eyes and finely chiseled lips. Perfect features and flawless white skin. No image of a blackened corpse, the shrunken skin stretched painfully across his skull, clawlike fingers burnt to crisps, hollow eye sockets that haunt my dreams.
I was in the black silence of a medieval street, and blindly I followed its sharp turns, comforted by the height of its narrow tenements, which seemed at any moment capable of falling together, closing this alleyway under indifferent stars like a seam.
To think that not so long ago we had danced under the moon as though all else in the world was perfect. Was his cynicism what drove him into the madness that eventually consumed his life? I've tasted his blood and read his mind. That seamless black sea, where all the colours have faded, the lone bird soaring across the void expanse.
I didn’t try to delve into his mind anymore after this first long and memorable glimpse. I looked up at Heaven and her court of mythical creatures fixed forever in the all powerful and inscrutable stars. Ink black was the night beyond them, so like jewels that old poetry came back to me, and ringing in my ears was the even sound of hymns sung by men.
And if you'd lean in closer to my lips I'll let you in on a secret: no one wants to admit this but it's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words... It was what he whispered to me before leaping into the fire.
