Fine Line

It's a dangerous game, it's a very fine line
and if one step is wrong, I'll have no cards to play
That's why I have got nothing to say tonight

                  --- Riot on an Empty Street by Kings of Convenience

I no longer know if it can happen, you and I.  It wasn't that I had no choice, it was that all the choices I had involved disregarding the soft lonely voice of reason.

I put a hand on the top of the barricade and leaped over it bracing for impact as I fell the nearly two-story drop onto the concrete pavement below. Despite landing into a crouching stance, the violence of the sudden stop traveled instantly through my bones all the way into my skull jarring my brain loose, or so it felt.  Images, like shards of steel-edged glass, flood into my mind.  Rain. You are dancing in the rain on a springtime hilltop, your wet dress clinging to your curves. Summer rain. You are in my arms on our beach watching the sea swell up from the battering coming down from the sky. Glistening sweat. Your raven hair clinging to the sides of your face as you thrust your hips upwards to meet mine, your swollen nipple filling my mouth. I fall over into a fetal position, clutching my head in a futile attempt to shield it from these image fragments. Fear. You looking back frantically while running hard in desperate stumbling strides alongside a long white fence. Frame after frame of fear and running and the pristine white fence. Low moans. Your hands in my hair as I bury my face between your legs suckling greedily on the moist trough between your lips. Frame after random image frame coursed through my mind. Even in the midst of the pain I can tell that some of these images are not from the past.  I shake my head to drive these images away but the pain only gets sharper. There is a little bit of you in everything.

An unheralded urgency somehow brings forth the strength from inside me and I get up on my feet. I have to find you tonight. Unsteady, I see both the images my eyes are seeing and what my untethered mind is creating for me. I would have fallen but for my groping hands finding a fence to steady me. An idyllic white fence that seems to stretch endlessly into the future. I stagger back in disbelief. Drawing my dagger from underneath my shirt I run wildly alongside the fence, bumping into it every few steps both to make sure that it is really there and to keep from falling. Suddenly I see you  running in front of me, red gashes on your arms. I can see the terror in your face as you look back. This can't be happening for real. I stop and shake my head to be able to see properly again. There is only the fence stretching in front of me. I keep running, dagger gripped firmly in my right hand. I can hear you calling out my name.