Vignette. Rain and whisky

Part of a free writing project I did in 2016. Picking two words at random, I wrote a short vignette from the first thing that came to mind. 

Words: rain, whisky

They hadn’t spoken in weeks. He harboured hatred toward her. A quiet simmering hatred that is fuelled by the bitterness that can come from loving someone so intensely. Like standing head-on to the traffic in the middle of a four-lane motorway, arms held wide to the danger and the rush of it. That reckless kind of love that tears off pieces of your soul. Feeling nothing but wild abandonment. Accepting what destruction comes of this love because it feeds you. It gives you life. And it sucks you dry.

 It’s not first love. First love is passionate. All-encompassing, yet tentative—you crawl slowly, carefully over one another’s body. The kisses are gentler. You are selfless in your first love, you are willing to please. And when you continue to grow and change that first love no longer fits, you outgrow it like a shoe. Then loves after that first one takes on forms of lustful nights and forcing triangles into circular moulds. You feel things the second, third, fourth time, but it’s some other emotion dressed up as love. Mutton dressed as lamb. Then one night, she peels her clothes off one item at a time in the candlelight and you see that it’s nothing but masquerading falsities. 

 Then she came along. She must have been number nine or ten, he’d lost count. He’d lost his suits of armour and let his bruised skin be seen and licked by her. She let her wounds be pried open by him. It was a filthy kind of love. Besotted destruction between the both of them. There were nights of terrifying passion fuelled by the whisky that neither of them could remember because of the alcoholic haze. There were arguments so spiteful, their tongues would have split had they spat another word. Kisses so intense, they were painful. Sex so magnetic, they tessellated over and over in a seamless repetitive rhythm. 

 But they hadn’t spoken in weeks. He’d not picked up her calls. Nor had she replied to that one message he’d sent late one night. They were purposefully hurting each other and hurting themselves. It felt as if he hadn’t drawn breath since he had last kissed her. 

 He couldn’t even recall the exact reason for the argument. Hundreds of little angry ants had marched into their colony that was then blown up by some spiteful spotty teenager with a taste for pyromania. Getting off on that expectant tension before something big blows up. Your head explodes. Your heart explodes. 

 He’d written her a letter. He’d gone old school in desperation. He could feel his skin falling off without her. 

 The roof of your building, tomorrow, 22:00. You need to breathe, as do I.

 It was pouring with rain—the heavy summer rain that falls in sheets. He stood by the railing that looked out over the city. There were city lights and no stars. He held in his hand a bottle of whisky, something nondescript and Irish that served to numb him. He harboured this hatred for her without knowing why. It was hatred or love in its purest form. The whisky made it hard to tell. The rain fell upon him and washed him clean. And he stood, remembering moments between her and him. Flicking through them like a photo book. 

 She’d stopped there a moment looking at him there in the rain. The whisky bottle clasped tightly from a limp right arm. She walked up to him and silently prized it from his hand. Drank deeply and said nothing. There was nothing but the rain around them, enveloping them in a secret fortress. Time was measured in sheets of rain. It was a second and a year. 

She reached out to him and grasped the back of his neck. Not shyly. With purpose. Her hand snaked up through his hair and as if it was beyond their control, they came together. Glued by the rain, they kissed away their anger or made it grow. They clawed at each other for fear that if they let go they would dissolve into rain and be washed away. She licked his bruises and he pressed into her wounds. It was a polluted kind of love that couldn’t be washed by rain. Or by Whisky.