An Allegory for Falling Out of Love

One day we woke up, and there were no secrets anymore.

It wasn’t that they disappeared; the old secrets were still around, and, ghost-like, we could still hear them whispering behind our ears and see them flitting at the corners of our vision, but we found ourselves unable to create new ones. It was sudden and jarring, and it made both of us feel uneasy for the whole day. Maybe tomorrow will be different, we said. Maybe tomorrow we’ll have new secrets
again.

But then tomorrow became yesterday and the day before yesterday and last week and two months ago and longer and longer ago, and the secrets never came back. The old secrets, like lovers whose hearts were discarded before their bodies, still trailed their tendrils over our arms and rested their cheeks against our shoulder blades and begged us not to tire of them, but it was no use. Their breath was stale on our skin; their hands were ice against our cheeks; their kisses belonged to corpses. We hated them for staying, even though we knew there was nothing else to take their place.

And then one day, even the old secrets were gone. Now all we’re left with is the heartless stone-and-metal cell of truth, and we’ve finally realized that even if the secrets were old and boring and stale, they were our secrets. And now we realize that all we have is nothing, because what are we without our secrets?

Snippet: Cain and

Snippets are pieces of writing, some of which have corresponding stories behind them but most of which are one-shots of a few paragraphs or less, which popped into my head basically exactly as they are displayed here. They cover or fill basically every writable surface of my life - Moleskins, napkins, the backs of receipts - and some of them which I find long enough, formed enough, or just interesting enough will make it here.

Cain and

Abel's eyes were red and his hair smelled sour and his manner was vacant. Cain felt the rage swell in his chest as it so often did when he saw his brother, the eternal fuck-up but still somehow their parents' golden boy. He bit his tongue to dull the anger.

He'd been biting his tongue every day, some days once or twice but usually almost constantly, for longer than his memory served him. At night when he couldn't sleep, he'd run the scales of scabs around the inside of his mouth and wait for the outburst he couldn't bite away.