The room was characterized by its inhabitants, unburdened by the history of the previous, created solely for the present. There was very little to the space itself. It was just so: personal effects, impersonal effects, inconsequential notes haphazardly scrawled on inconsequential pieces. The carpet, those fibers of burnt orange - sole survivors left behind, clinging to their ghosts, waiting for a triumphant return, almost certain a lost cause.
A warm tone perched above, above the incandescents casting dim hues, above the burnt orange crushed by years of footfall, above us on either end, hanging, leaving only a shared peal of laughter to bridge the spaces in between.
Sitting back, catching her breath, she glanced in the mirror: a vaguely perceptible smile softly curled into the corner of her lips, a loose hairpin furled up in loose locks whined for attention.
She exhumed a bottle from the drawer, agape, and cast a dime sized drop into her palm. A pause. A tilt of the chin. Slender fingers coasted along cheekbones and docked at the edge of her eyes. They glistened, her eyes, not out of sadness or out of any emotional wrenching - purely wet with desires, adrift with thoughts, anchored in joy.
Extracting the pin from its futile trappings, she repositioned and slipped it back in with an efficient grace. A sharp yet relaxed exhale eased the hair away from her brow. It drifted and settled across exposed collar bones, exposing a small sense of victory.
-Ha!
She smiled. It fell just so. It felt just so.
Her reflection revealed this brief moment, fleeting, the short term soon to be replaced by another. False facts will spill over and fill the channels carved away by the years, over years. An arrangement of composed motions cast into a reservoir to emerge later a mere afterthought.
There might have been the scent of vanilla...tobacco...musk...sandalwood...?
As this quiet apparition peels away from memory, when we exit this chamber to join the past, we will remove those ineffectual trappings that made it just so: those personal effects, those impersonal effects, those scrawls on haphazard pieces. We will leave behind those fibers and incandescents as the vapors join the ghosts below and the tones above. This, the unacknowledged scene, will dissipate, will erode.
But the wisps coiled into the faint lines around her eyes, the lines that betrayed the confidences of a heart that moved with a rapturous pulse... Her wild mane, like tendrils taking root, are indelible, frozen in...falling just...
Falling.
She gilded her lips in rose.
- Too much?
Never. She is just so. Perfectly just so.