Echoes

I heard your voice echoing down the corridor. I traced its resonant depths through pillared shadows and its rising tones through sun-speckled motes that danced in patterns predetermined by gravity and nature's laws.
A quadrille perhaps?
I'd danced one once with you, your hands cold even through the layered lace of a chiffon gown. You'd whispered my name then, the syllables strident against my tympanum but so low that they spoke only of the closeness of you.

I heard your voice on the corridor. I could not see you. I thought you might have hidden around the corner. Except when I looked no one was there. Just bare faced red brick, held in straight lines by crumbling mortar. You'd held me against plaster once. The paint had clumped artistically in dripping formations that gouged my skin and left red indents long after you had kissed me.
I don't remember the taste, or scent, or breath of you. I do remember the plaster. As white as Grecian pillars in photographs, freshly scrubbed with soda for tourist brochures.

I heard your voice echoing on the corridor. This afternoon, when the Autumn Sun sent out reminders of the days demise in shades of jaundiced time. Your voice faded too briefly, and you were gone again. A remembrance of times when we delighted in the vagaries of life. Searching for the lower limits of existence, reveling in imagined hedonism, yet striving for something more.
You'd sought it with the constancy of gravity. As inevitable as those dust speckled motes that fall now in memory of your voice. As I once fell and you.
Sharp addictions spear the mind, the same way nails pierce walls to hold pictures hung in galleries. Beauty and aesthetics are hard taskmasters, cruel in the demands they inflict. We strived for such perfection of visions, you and I. We crafted philosophies of love, and built bouquets of words, richly scented, to entice the luminous mind. All we attracted were aphids and moths. Crawling destitute forms of vulgarity and consumption. We did not realise the feasts we had layed was too rich, too diverse.
It decomposed.
Phrases blacken into idiomatic cliche, clauses separate stem from stem until words are reduced to unscented petals tinged with the ochre of age. Syllables by some miracle ascend and vowels drift into nauseous vapour.

We breathed it all you and I.

Now all I hear is the movement of the breeze through the white pear, that grows alongside the corridor. Its boughs burdened by a heavy harvest.