This was inspired by a picture I saw on DeviantArt. Something about it hit me hard and I've been writing on this ever since. Completely original writing, no fanfiction or anything like that. Comments and critique are more than welcome. The inspiration


Water the color of mud, a mix of sea-breeze and tepid water swirling in the wind, blasting the short, dark hair that framed an unremarkable face away. Long lashes brushed against his cheeks as the cold wind stung his cheeks, head tilted back ever so slightly as he inhaled, taking in the scents around him and slowly released. Calm. Nothing but was in his body to the point in which it felt as if the air around him was frozen, thick and as if he were swimming through molasses with every slight movement. He knew his shoes were soaked clear through, off brand black and white converse that had more rips and tears than he cared to count.

Distantly he remembered getting dressed that morning, walking out without another word to the nameless woman smoking a cigarette in bed next to him, wrapped in a sheet and watched him go with dull, glass like eyes as she remarked that he seemed different that last night. Last night was a distant past, something as out of reach as his childhood and as easily forgotten, brushed aside as patiently as a parent disengaged their leg from a clingy child. A part of him whispered in words he could barely make out that he should be more concerned about the fading of his memory. Water rushed up, swirling and almost boiling around the layered tiles he stood on, ice lapping at the cuff of jeans that were too loose on his slender frame, soaking through to thin ankles before receding back.

It was cold. The unbuttoned white collared dress shirt he'd picked up off the floor and slipped into providing little warmth, especially when he couldn't be bothered to button it up in the first place. Strange how he was numb to everything, too heavy, too tired to feel in general and yet the cold itself seeped through, making a home within the very marrow of his bones. That small part said he should probably go back to the surely empty, nicotine scented apartment he called home. The bare, broken walls and the rat infested cupboards with the refrigerator that either was seven degrees too cold or ten degrees too warm to store anything in, the blood and piss stained mattress that always smelled like sour sex even after he'd sprayed it down and dumped three bottles of bleach on it. Probably rat corpses in there too now that he thought about it.

At one point, he'd had a goal in his life. At one point, he'd actually had ambition and drive to make it big, to make his name known to the entire world and to be someone one day. His hands, so long fingered and delicate with their firm, magical touch on both the canvas and a woman's body, reached idly for the wallet in his back pocket, feeling nothing there and felt his lips curve up on one side of his mouth. Figured, she probably hid it in the sheet, take the last thing worth while in there, not that he remembered what was there to begin with. He remembered when this place didn't smell like the sea mixed with a flooded septic tank, when the monotonous grey tones in the sky were brighter, more vivid.

He remembered a time where they'd laid back and watched the cloud float lazily overhead and the seagulls cried their harsh, barking code at one another. Almond eyes, dark hair and skin that rivaled his own in complexion. Round face and shining smile, it was hard to believe that she'd been gone for nearly ten years. Walked out on a day much like this one and disappeared without a trace. They'd eventually, after five years, did a TV segment on it, a fictionalized retelling of the last seven hours before she'd disappeared. He remembered the playing of their last phone conversation, the last time he'd ever heard from her.

“Say, do you remember what I told you that day?”

Her voice was just as clear and quiet as it had been over the phone, his eyes closing as he relived the memory. The paintbrush had been in his mouth as he mixed the shade of blue he'd already created with white, trying to get just that right hue for the shadow of the dress for his painting.

“Which day was this?”

Garbled, distracted and distant, the blue wasn't coming out the way he'd wanted it to and somehow, he needed to figure out how to make it only a touch lighter, to make it become that special color he had no name for. Silence had filled the other line before she'd laughed quietly, a faint smile he could picture without so much as closing his eyes. She was probably twisting the cord in a loop around her index finger, leaning against the wall and staring at the floorboards of the hallway.

“You don't remember?”

It hadn't been that big of a deal, not to him anyways. She'd told him lots of things before, he couldn't remember all of them for crying out loud.

“Julian?”

“Yeah?”

Maybe if he added that slight bit of lavender he'd used for that kite blocking the sun...

“I think you'll remember some day. Maybe not soon, but some day.”

What the hell was she talking about? “Some day”, that was one of the words he hated to hear the most out of everyone's mouth. He'd asked his mother when his father was coming home or when they'd be able to move to a better place than the shit hole they'd been in since he was three. Always she'd smiled, touching that jade comb he'd given her as his version of a wedding ring, a promise that he'd do it properly when he came back from his next business trip and told him he'd return some day soon.

“Don't know what to tell you Iris.”

That's right, that'd been the last thing he'd said to her, used his nickname for her as a playful rebellion against her actual name. She'd smiled again, he knew whenever she would on the phone, though something' had been off and it hadn't just been his imagination before she'd whispered a child-like 'bye-bye' into the phone and quietly hung up.

Next call he'd gotten was from her hysterical mother shouting at him to return her daughter and, when he'd hung up on her, the next was from the cops telling him they were headed over and to please remain where he was. That painting, the color blue he'd desired so badly, was the only one still hanging, still in one piece in the rundown shit hole his mother had lived, loved and died in waiting for that lying son of a bitch to come and get her. Same shit hole he had lived and loved someone in as well.

Same shit hole he'd waited for someone in, just like his mother.

“Where'd you go Iris?”

His voice, unfamiliar to his own ears croaked out of his throat, husky, rasping like he'd smoked three packs in as many hours and sucked down a bottle of cheap scotch. An old man's voice for someone who still had, as the long gone friends said, a long life ahead of him. Old man's voice for an old, weary man's heart, it was fitting. He'd sold his paints, his paintings and brushes, all of his equipment to collectors, to garage sales in an attempt for a quick fix, resorting to credit cards and loans from particularly shady places to get his new means of escape.

He'd quit cold turkey, suffering through the withdrawal symptoms after he'd woken up from crashing to find that he'd painted some twisted nightmare on the wall of his bedroom with his fingers to the point they'd bled. Now he chain smoked, usually only after he was done with the woman of the night that he'd paid with the cash left over from social security. It was less he'd scared himself and more he didn't want to risk doing the same thing on her painting, the one he'd never finished and had planned to give to her on her eighteenth birthday as his engagement present, as his way of proposing.

This one horse town would be sunk in less than five years, every year the water crept closer and closer to the heart of it, proof of which being that, if someone was dumb enough to swim out, they could find where Iris' old house was, sunk under nearly thirty feet of water by now. Maybe she'd gone back there, he thought at his hands, cracked, scarred and peeling. He could see the needle tracks, never leaving, only fading little by little, in his wrists, on his arms and probably in his neck when he'd been too fucking out of it to do something himself.

“Sorry.”

He said aloud, the old man's voice croaking out again as he took a step further, wading through the thick, syrupy air that stank of shit and salt, feeling the icy current swirl about his ankles, the uneven tiles, some eroded by the violent churning, the pull of the water, some broken off entirely by time stabbing against the thin sole and into his feet. His movements were almost comically drunken, stumbling, shuffling as if he had no coordination left in his body, barely managing to keep from pitching forward when a particularly strong wave smacked into his knees, the cold driving the rattling breath from him as he swayed dangerously.

He kept walking, looking at the endless expanse of broiling sewer colored sea, at the storm clouds angrily piling up in the distance until a sudden lightening, a ghost-like caress of barest warmth, touched the bare, lip and teeth marked chest of his. His eyes opened looking up to see a lining of gold in one of the clouds, a haze of bright light that burned his retinas, searing his vision with spots until he managed to close his eyes and blink to clear.

The patch of blue left in his wake, the perfect shade before his eyes, that very color he'd sought back then on the phone, that consumed him after seventy three failed attempts; it was there. Right before his very eyes. It was his Iris' color. Something inside of him wept for the sight of it, though he showed no sign of doing so outwardly. He was knee-deep and going further, in water that made anything below feel nonexistent, like whatever the water was covering slowly but surely made him disappear. Took him little by little to where she was.

He looked up, watching that blue fade, covered more and more by clouds, by the boiling grey, til he couldn't see anything anymore from the salt burning his eyes. Closing them, he kept walking, robotic, automatic movement even when he was met by silence, by the pulling at his arms and legs, by the impatience he could feel as he smiled genuinely, though his lips cracked and bled, stinging and filling his mouth was copper, with salt and something disgusting he didn't even bother naming.

Sorry Iris, I don't remember. Maybe you'll tell me like always, when you finally stop pullin' on me and show me where we're goin'.