A Night at the Carnival

It was not love, but a beautiful, brutal possession. She found me in the house of a thousand lies, a labyrinth of fractured light where her unreal beauty was multiplied into an infinite, agonizing army. I saw her true face and a hundred false ones, and fell in love with them all. She was a creature spun from sugar and electricity, a living prop whose painted lips spoke a truth my world had never known.

Our meeting was not a meeting, but a collision—a lightning strike in the dust and velvet dark, a stolen, impossible lifetime lived between the gaze of painted giants and the skeletal ribs of the roller coaster. Then the carnival folded, a phantom city vanishing with the dawn. She was the mirror and the illusion, and I, then just a young man with the beautiful, aching scar of her reflection burned forever onto my soul.