The Lounge.

The Lounge.

 He makes his way past the doorman with relative ease, maybe it was the uniform, or maybe it was the emptiness he held just behind his eyes. Either way, one thing was definite: this was not a room one entered easily. Smoke and whiskey fill his nostrils with the faintness of sex lingering just out of reach. Debauchery and vanity. Reckless abandon. He leans against the bar and makes his order as a drunken seaman slams his full weight into a fellow marine. He watches as the two men wrestle for position, and gives half a thought to helping his fellow corpsman. Instead, he orders his bourbon neat, smiles, and lights up as the young boys are shoved through the exit. The barman and he share a glance as the young women laugh in their ripped stockings from a decade before, and jazz makes the room spin as he rides the Merry-go-round without moving an inch. The old eyes paired with young legs, and the hungry hearts with tired minds layout across this empty graveyard, where yesterdays weren’t even memories and masks were dawned and souls were lost and friends forgotten and hearts eaten all the same. He felt this. He held it in his bones.

“You looking for anything in particular?”

He responds with a dismissive exhale of his Lucky.

“A distraction.”

The barman laughed as he wiped spilled wine and littered ash from the counter.

“Well, we got a lot of that. Stick around, shows about to start, you won’t want to miss it.”

Armed now, whiskey in one hand a Lucky in the other, he begins to question his surroundings. Assessing the individual abnormality that was this room. What was he looking for? Why walk in out of the warm city lights? Why leave the base? Why tonight? Why here? For a man so especially concerned with the make and the mortar of his own destiny, he had no true or actual understanding of why he was standing in this room. Had anything come before it? And would anything continue to be of importance hereafter it? Maybe it was the poppy smoke filling his lungs. Or maybe it was the thirst. The one he felt building for it. For the cold and violent absolution of his soul. He’d taken it before. Had enjoyed it. Been disgusted by it. And had never been able to silence it. 

 That old friend began to creep up on him once again; the cold fever, the hot rage. A boy then steps to the stage and takes his seat at the piano, as the soldier now turns for the door, but then with no warning, a shot rings out. Hot white with a low husk. The sound cuts through the room and paralysis sets in. The venom runs through his veins pumping faster with each note. Eyes turn and there: Blood Red with lips to match. The piano secondary, and the tune an afterthought. Only cold beauty in a now empty room. He felt himself moving closer. Closer. Toward the stage now. Toward her now. No control. The only truth he knew in this moment is that they had met once before, and were now meeting again. The room parts. They knew. Knew what he knew, what had always been known, and he had done everything in his power to forget. It was undeniable. She was his, and he hers.

His fever is gone. The subtle kindness of her nature, the saddened look in her emerald eyes, and the all too familiar feeling that he loved her in this life, and in all others that came before it. Her song encompassed, overcame, and healed him simultaneously. Those eyes. Those Eyes. Those eye- They meet his, and she falters, if only for a moment….