What is it to feel each dawn, and all that it yields?

Foreign tongue lapped against your neck in meandering patterns of hormonal expression through saliva. Brittle motions of joints snapping reverberations throughout your body's bony structure and softened meats.

Is there no end to this glimmering chaotic rushing of sensory return?

No. It is cyclical in its nature.

Your eyes turn to examine the body beside yours, the tongue that drew hazy images of passionate nothingness against your skin. There is warmth there, but more a hollowed pang, distant and abstract. More a fleeting reminder than a visceral, real time expression of it.

There is nothing there for you. No corridors meant for your explorations. No hidden chests or tomes for you to plunder or read. You've simply slipped into a door left carelessly ajar.

You are perfectly aware of this, no attempts to bury it will ever be deep enough.

She reaches to you, gently pulling your right hand over. She pulls and massages the fingers and the palm, commenting to herself in low tones how soft your skin is.

You can barely hear this, but the childlike mumble of her voice seems to leave an impression. What kind of impression you quietly struggle to discern. The mind is such a fickle thing after all.

“Do you love me?” she asks, not looking up from your hand, still kneading the apparently soft skin with an almost mechanical rhythm.

Her voice is as waif thin as her body.

The vulnerability of her voice makes her appear more fragile than ever before. Of course her body has always been like that, slight and flitting like a fairy child wandering from her mother, but somehow her question adds to the fragility of her image. Like a porcelain doll you could crush simply by applying too much pressure to your grip.

You could reach out and touch her at the cheek, just below her left eye, and trail along tracing her jawline to her chin, down her throat to her chest, and along the softly plump curvature of her right breast to the small, pink nub of her nipple.

Behind your finger the pathway it drew would be crackled and scarred, like earth dried and burned away.

Porcelain shattered.

This mark would not be physical. It would never be visible to others, possibly not even to her, but she would certainly feel its scar tissue lancing from her face to her chest.

You will always see it. You will always know how you burned a strange and aching wanderlust into this poor girl's flesh.