Story: He Lies In Bed

My mind is changing in an unchanging world. I spoke to you the other day. We don't speak anymore, except on your terms. You told me you missed me, loved me, implored for my return. You're still singing the same song? I couldn't believe you again. The song plunges me back into the fractured recesses of my mind where the memories are stored in sensations; smells and tastes from a time I thought I knew my mind. I was wrong. Trying to find some sense in the words, I find myself lost in the days. I remember watching them fall like petals. Rotting. And then... And then a soft parade of nights through my head in colours and shapes I cannot begin to describe. You holding me in a silverframed bed, trembling as words fell from your lips and hung heavy in the air, the hot syllables delectable between us. Me reaching out and plucking words from your head with ease. Sharing dreams. The electric tension that rolled thundrous around the bed we loved in. Butterfly eyelids. Your pupils swelling as the tears carved salty paths down to your lying mouth. Words, words that washed over me then, the sting to come later as I lie in the cold hollow where we lay, together.
I blink and the walls haze with tears. At work I watch as a lobster's eyes cloud opalesque with pain as it boils to a rapid death in a pan of seething water. I shut my eyes. Rich tells me they don't feel a thing. He is lying.
At home the orange glare of a cigarette punctuates the silence. The nebulous fuzz of the television, untuned. The neon from outside invades the cold room, perverting the dusty surfaces and creating images where there are none. I watch your face creep across the walls as my tired mind stretches the photographs that are peeling slowly from their yellowed sellotape. Your smile locked behind my eyelids. I still remember, even now.
The summer rain was refreshing on our skin, sticky from the hot day and the words we shed so casually. So easily we slipped. Your hands were so soft, the hands of an artist. You were so charming, so lost in a crowd. My head in the clouds. No feet on the ground. She was nameless then. I didn't want to believe. Couldn't be real, couldn't be real. We didn't talk about her. Don't talk about her now. Your neck adorned with a bruise, a loveflower from her lips. We didn't mention it. I didn't see fit. You held me close and I believed every word.
And now?

I can't even look at you now.