• April. A sadistically long month full of down pouring rain that continues to clutch onto the frigid mantle of winter without the promise of spring. The world remains caught in an ethereal wasteland, stuck between the realm of frozen death where everything sleeps, and the precious plane of eternal growth as life shakes her drowsy head to wipe the long hibernation from her eyes.

    Rain is only the beginning stage, a simple step towards the cleansing of morbid mortality that stalks the sleeping world all through the frozen season. It falls from tempestuous gray clouds full of somber drab as its faded color squeezes all the life out of the joyful hangings in life.

    It always rains here in April, sometimes without end, drowning out the smiles and pleasures in our pathetically short existence. It shadows the world in a dull, lifeless blanket that can, at times seem to last into eternity. Even the sun cannot always permeate the dreary emotions dredged up by a week of this endless down pour and just when you feel like you’re at your proverbial lowest. Just when there is no hope of ever seeing the warmth of spring, the clouds disperse and leave behind only remnants of things that once were. The infinite gray darkness then becomes nothing more than a diluted memory, leaving behind the cheery disposition of an eternal sun.

    …He was like the rain… came with it and left with it…

    I used to hate the rain, always feeling a cold chill crawl up my spine when the moist taste of dirt and sky would dance upon the tip of my tongue. The scent came on the air, electrically charged with thunder and lightning that would shower down upon the dismal earth without any clear signs of stopping. Yet, in the April month of my seventeenth year, something changed my mind about rainstorms.

    His hands were large, big enough to engulf my own and still have room left over. They were flawless hands, skin looking as delicate as tracing paper and yet nothing seemed to be able to permeate it. He was the epitome of strength, a towering pillar of otherworldly force rolled into a tall, lanky man with irises the color of raging tempest clouds. His eyes would dance when something intrigued him, a slight half smile corning the edges of his barely upturned lips, that strange tattoo lining the boundaries of his left eye seemed to always capture my attention when I caught his side silhouette.

    To say he was beautiful would be an understatement, but he was. Instead of being handsome as most very attractive men should be, the man I fell in love with had an odd charm about him that almost glowed radiantly in his harshly angular features. He wasn’t of this plane of existence, that much was obvious, but what I didn’t know in the beginning was just how far away from my own world he truly was.

    Looking back on it all now, through all the times we spent together in that tornado of spinning emotions and odd string tumultuous meetings of strange people, I have come to the conclusion that I was the hopelessly lost one, even though it was he who didn’t know where he was going. The man I fell for had never once denied he wasn’t perfect, constantly reminding me of exactly what he was whenever he came home smelling like fresh blood. It was my own selfish veil of lack luster, innocent righteousness that I pretended to grip onto that forced him to do what he did in the end. When he died, I felt exactly as he did whenever those horrible monsters of his home came to kill him. I became just as pathetic, lost, and unloved as he had.

    ...His dead, doll-like eyes stare out at me through a sheet of dusty, gray glass and I can’t stop screaming, begging for him to stand up again even though I know he doesn’t have the strength. He loves me. He said so himself, but I wasn’t listening because I was too busy crying about how I wanted him to change. What I should have been looking at wasn’t his misdeeds, but my own string of thoughtless actions that led all the way up to these last remaining seconds of his life.

    He protected me from harm and I watched as the life was crushed him, unable to do anything to help. Something in me must’ve snapped when his smiling eyes finally stopped sparkling, because all I could remember was that fateful day I met him. The movie reel of our clashing worlds runs on auto-replay with drowned out color and faded edges, forcing me to remember the devil of a man I had just let stream through my angelic fingers…