The lightning exploded in a sudden flash of light behind the dark silhouette of mangled tree branches, meshing together and creating a still frame that lasted all of one second before vanishing into the dark and becoming invisible again. It was beautiful.

So beautiful that she remained there, perched against the wooden railing of the dirty white veranda and in the middle of hungry mosquitoes that flocked to her damp skin in the muggy night air. So beautiful that she remained there to watch it happen again. And again.

And with each resounding crack of thunder that reverberated through her thin, birdlike frame, she felt the beauty of that single second. She reveled in it, tried to breathe it in, to drag it out and make it last maybe just one second longer. However, it never did. Its perfectly beautiful brevity never altered, no matter how she wished it to be so.

She imagined her time with the fiery, oceanic boy from her memory as that one, single, beautiful second; incomparably sublime, and yet gone just as her fingers wrapped around the beauty, its sweet tendrils electrifying her pores. Gone just as she appreciated its glory.

Days, she thought. Hundreds of days she'd spent in his transcendent company, hundreds of nights identical to the one that swarmed about her head. Years. Eternities. Gone and brief.

Now, she realized, feeling the rain hit the wood beneath her hands to dance up onto her skin in an icy mist, she'd spent almost as many days and nights without him as with him. Without the pale, soft skin and eyes the color of glass plucked from the sea. Eyes that reflected her dreams, that held the world, that contained all glory in the iridescent irises. Eyes that she drowned in, her body growing heavy in the downy comforters on her mattress.

She'd spent days and nights without his heat, without his lips, without the tickle of his lashes on her cheek as she fell asleep. Without his voice, without his fingertips. Without him.

She'd spent nights instead curling into the space he'd once occupied, shaking like a jonesing junkie. She'd spent nights regretting, and then regretting her regret. Resenting it, cursing it, pushing it away, and calling it wrong. She'd spent nights loving a beautiful woman instead, one she'd loved just as long. One she loved just as fiercely. She spent nights in love with the only one who could ever bring her away from the fiery, oceanic boy from her distant, dying memory.

Lighting flashed through the trees and she turned from it, bare feet moving across the rough concrete. Days and nights, she thought. Days and nights. And she moved through the doorway and up the stairs, up into her room and down into her bed. She curled into the place he had once occupied, the place that the beautiful woman who encompassed her entire world now, who she loved with all there was to love, had once laid. She thought of them both and loved them both.

And as the resounding crack of thunder reverberated through her thin, birdlike frame, she softly wept.