Haitian Heartbreaks & Forbidden Winter Nights
By: Saman Nadeem
Tags: Lovestory, Heartbreak, Dreams, Creativity, Love

The racing footprints of the sultry winds had stopped dead in their tracks, and the unsung notes of love froze like a contemptuous iceberg between them. It was clogged black magic. It was last December. She heard the enchanted mirrors break themselves in Cinderella chateaus of her unfulfilled dreams. It was the beguiled, crimson eve of blotchy anguish. It was a deliciously ruthless winter afternoon when she first embraced the first bouquet of fabricated love. Like the caress of a fairy-tale taffeta skirt, words that smelt like the clandestine peck of a strawberry shortcake, bittersweet chocolate and dwindling promises brewed from wood smoke. It made her storming heartbeat flutter as if someone had suddenly blinded with a handful of bewitched sawdust. Shaking, she felt the dewy cauldron of his ravenous caresses. It was this plundering hypnotic moment when she first felt the powdery touch of his caramelized kiss of heady, conniving words. His threadbare antics of lovelorn deception.

Chalky words, that breathed deeper than the sapphire-filled oceans, words that poured their crumbling grandeur like trickling tears of snowdrops, riddled words that lay perched everywhere. Strewn heavily by an intricate clockwork robe of capricious contemplation, she looked in wonder. Stippled in the mementos of toxic romanticism and perfumed with the eclipsing witchcraft, she sometimes grew too perilous to be alive. Bellowing, like the tattered cloak of magic from a musty witch’s sorcerous courtyard, she felt unruffled, serene chained in his thoughts. Yes, it was that scandalous, gobbling afternoon when she walked unknowingly into the heart of doom, the ecclesial chapters of unrequited paper towns of untold love.

Who was she? Why had she met him?

Was it fate?

Destiny?

The whisper of a voodoo doll?!

It is a miraculous paper castle!

A bequeathing Vanity Fair?

Is it vanilla, almonds and milky wonder?

The azure shades of the Arabian night sky?

Perhaps, it is anything that is sugar, spice, and something astoundingly nice.

An eclipsed sprinkle of chocolate sunshine, a pint of rosy thoughts and the velvety fables.

The dwindling gasp of a nightingale.

The breathing shadow of the lavender sky?

The pearlescent smile of an enchanter?

The fairy dust of a magician’s wand?

The Auburn umbrella of honeysuckle mirth.

The crumbling whisper of a fabled looking glass?

The lustrous wisp of evening primroses?

The unbridled wishes of a blonde bridesmaid?

Tender is the bejeweled night,

Calloused is the bellowing cry of the magical ravens,

And, silhouetted is the whisper of the dark voodoo dolls.

Is it sugar, spice or a sprinkled slice of paradise?

The celestial lips of an angel?

Is it the tinkling of the bells played by the dreaming scullery maid in the Barbican ghoulish tower of Notre Dame?

The fairy tendrils of an auburn-haired maiden’s silken petticoat?

Was it just the warm, kneaded fragrance of the topsy-turvy garden pots of buttercups, bunches of rosemary and the elderflower blossoming in the bewitched vanilla orchards?

Perhaps, it a sprightly shower of crooning cymbals, a mist of vanilla,

The whispering teardrops of faded English tea roses,

The rusty ode of the love-bitten fairy dust in the heart of the lilac heavens?

Yes, and we are its cavorting harlequins, swooning and simpering with oodles of glam and anything that is exotically coffee, sugar, and spice.

It was a ridiculously low-lying Haitian café. A gory orange courtyard with swindling charms of myrrh colognes, hints of kneaded cinnamon and vanilla breathing from flaky caricatures of love-bitten oracles, dryads, and mischievous Haitian art. Quaint. Timeless. Nestled and mollycoddled, and lost in of time. Silhouetted with teething shades of lust, and ragged cinders of unhinged perversity. Sealed. Moreover, stamped with a forbidden kiss. A never-ending, engulfing kiss that whisks away the secrets of every tarot card, every betrothed whisper. Like the sly, voodoo figurine that that bleats, yelps and shrieks until the prey is callously numb. The one that winds up like the pirouetting parapets of perpetual misfortune as the shabby wisps of the neurotic love potions and mottled twilight threaded into sweet blasphemy.

The quivering stars shone no more and the sky looked more bedraggled, more hapless, more urchin than ever. Slowly, the moonlight bled, fleecing away its glory, as she stared, gazing like a bitten, shuddering rag doll in awe of what had just happened with her in the last few tinker bell moments that changed every crowning winter of her life. Who is he? A malicious trickster? An eccentric specter? The scornful mad man with a selling tongue? The commonplace love con artist? The usual masquerader who trades with vitriolic secrets honeyed with deceitful chapters of love, which would haunt her for the lives and the worlds to come.