Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) by Daniel Klieve

Welcome to Palatine Hill.”

V – Dissonance
    ~ Kayla ~
    23/11/2023
    My favourite memory of Naithe – maybe the one memory of him that I’ll never completely let go of – is from this one night, just after Christmas, a couple of years before The Crisis.
    Once upon a week of lost, love -soaked sweetness, we’d shut ourselves up and away from the world. We were living on leftovers and scraps from Christmas dinner with his parents, and we’d made this pact – because we hadn’t known each other for all that long, then – that we were going to pretend that the world had ended, and we were the only ones left. Just us, locked away from the dead, empty world outside of his apartment.
    I think what I remember best of all is the smell. The air was heavy with the blending, competing scents of stale tobacco smoke, peppermint throat lozenges, pomegranate lip gloss, and this horrible, budget brand, bought-in-bulk air freshener from Costco. That was back when Naithe was still trying to find some way to dispose of the evidence of my pack-a-day smoking habit.
    When it comes to all things olfactory, almost any smell you can imagine can eventually b ecome your ‘default’: your point of reference for interpreting any and all other scents. If you’ve ever been to a dairy farm for more than an hour or two, you’ll totally get what I’m talking about. It’s just a matter of time. So, after the first couple of days of our little lock-in – if one of us opened a window or the front door – the smell of fresh, clean air seemed somehow disconcertingly foreign.
    It’s funny how that works; how the normal becomes the odd, and the odd starts to become a new species of normal. Things that seem so totally noticeable to begin with...they start to blend into the minutiae of the day to day, and become just as unremarkable as any other unremarkable thing could possibly be. Provided, of course, they have a little bit of time and a lot of misdirection to work with. And we had misdirection. We had plenty.
    Mostly, it was that we were both trying to think about anything other than the fact that I had to go back to Melbourne a few days later. We just push ed aside anything and everything that was likely to distract us from one another. But there was also the sex that we’d completely failed to have. That was a focus, too. Neither of us had been deliberately avoiding it, I don’t think. We were just completely wrapped up in whispers in ears...lips on skin...the sound of each other’s laughter, and the light in one another’s eyes.
    I remember that it was mid -evening, and we were watching something mindless. I was in nothing but my underwear and one of his old, oversized T-shirts. I just remember looking at him...looking straight into his eyes, and telling him – for no particular reason other than that I felt it – that he was it for me...the one and the only...and that no one could ever measure up to the strange, beautiful, perfectly imperfect Human being I’d come, so quickly and unquestioningly, to love with everything that I had in me.
    At the time, I couldn’t help but wonder what the fuck I was even doing. Emotional ope nness was a skill-set I had barely scraped the surface of. Trust and honesty were foreign languages to me. And as far as succumbing to co-dependency? I’d never been ‘that girl’; I’d always been the girl who laughed at the idea of ‘love’ and said something about neurochemistry and biological imperatives.
    Which was true. It was and is about that. Merely that.
    But ‘merely’ is a deceptive word. Nothing has ever been ‘merely’ what it is. Not in the cumulative history of the world, or the Galaxy, or the Universe.
    But that’s moving away from the point. Sort of. Not really, I guess...but it is getting a little ahead of things.
    What I meant, was...that the girl who met a hot guy and came over all ‘Disney’? That was a girl I’d never wanted to be. Never would be. In fact, historically, I was far