Disclaimer: Methos and Alexa not mine. Never will be.

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Rhapsody Alexa Requiem

A prose poem by Fortuita James

City of death.  It's dust before me.  A freeway, 
building, monuments.  Castles in  the sand.

Faces in the sand.  Line drawings, in a child's hand.  
One, I'll pause, admire. Another, scratch out beneath 
my heel.

And my own face.  I desperately trace it, trying to 
remember its hollows. I dig my fingers in and imprint 
it.  Beside hers, this time, and I know it to be a 
space more fraught, less permanent, than many others.  
But I hold, or try to.

Walls crumble, water washes over, and I disappear 
again.  

It seems somehow amusing that my tracery lacks even the 
permanence of hers.  It is, at best, an impression, an 
almost outline of two dimensions.  Created with love, 
but with no pride, no expectation.  And no hope.  It 
should be amusing.  Would that I could smile.

My scratchings on this earth I must abandon.  For all 
the insignificance of people, I am less than that to 
them. 

For this moment, Alexa makes me different.  My phantom 
face has a solidity to which I cling. I cling, as the 
harsh west wind blows her away. 

So she passes.  Passes from my arms, from time, and memory.  
That memory which is my only permanence, and such tragedy 
that it should become hers too.

FIN.