"End-of-World Scene in Which We Don’t Make Love with a Backdrop of Fire Because I Have Low Sex-Drive, Depression & We Could Have Avoided This" by Camille Ferguson

Camille Ferguson lives in and loves Cleveland, Ohio. Camille recently graduated from Cleveland State University where she received the Neal Chandler Creative Writing Enhancement Award. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Rabid Oak, Madcap Review, Jam & Sand, Drunk Monkeys, and Okay Donkey, among others.​

---

End-of-World Scene in Which We Don’t Make Love with a Backdrop of Fire Because I Have Low Sex-Drive, Depression & We Could Have Avoided This


I’m always babbling about the flowers, flowers from my throat¾but my mouth blooms into wounds.  Orchids open like stars; holes open, in the sky, like mouths. I can’t open my heart, speak from it, or get off the couch. I love you, but it’s unimportant. Look, outside—the sky oranges all the way from California. You want more--not of me but from me: my body a distant planet. My touch—'nonexistent.’ I wish, I wish, I wish. I’d love it--to cease--to go out like a light. Decay, destabilize, vaporize. I’d pummel everything in reach like enraged bees, bloated star that I am. I wish it, upon the most beautiful of stars—bright memoirs left streaked on a tar-black canvas. I’m done with passion, it’s emaciating. I wonder if I’ll make it to see us wasted. 

Outside, sirens sing unending, elated. Maybe, finally, I have been annihilated. I am strange & spent. On bitters brewed of my own pessimism, I drink like the world is ending.
 
Outside—the world is ending. I love you, but it’s unimportant.