A Beautiful Blue Haze

The loss of a man's wife helps him to see through the blindfold of love.

Stranger and stranger still: a blue haze in his head, smoke rising from the fires of some dark depression, is somehow the most beautiful, the most pure, thing he has ever felt. But is that not the funny thing with sadness? Happiness is to burning to be taken a hold of, but sadness can be grasped and used to build a beautiful kingdom for one to reside in when they are in need of solitude.

      But who lit this fire within his soul? Who slid the match against a hard surface and flicked it at the logs piled up in him? Nobody in particular; but the absence of she who would put the fire out contributed to the billowing blue smoke.

      But what a mistake it would be--a poor, foolish one!--to pretend that said woman merely doused the fires within his soul. Oh no, she did so much more than that: she lit the fire in his groin; gave birth to his children; let him love something worth loving; and treated him so kindly that he considered it impossible for him to live past her demise. Now, with her having passed, he has proven his prediction to be correct: you cannot call this living.

      He wakes in the night and stretches his arm to the side, feeling for where she had once been sleeping. Alas, his hands grasp only the thin flesh of air, and he cries himself to sleep. While lost in the Aschervine--a word of which he cannot, should not, know the meaning of--he finds himself walking down the hallway of a house old as time, its walls rotting and its boards creaking upon every step, but still glorious nonetheless. He's been here before: when she was still alive. However, before, despite the blatant decay of the hallway, he still found something beautiful about it, refusing to note its defuncts. Now, though, he sees only a ruined hall, nothing more. Like the removal of love, of purpose, has given him the ability to see through the beautiful lie of it all.

      And oh! .what the fading of the façade has revealed to him: the walls no longer contain an antique appeal, but are only putrid planks that smell of old wood; the boards beneath him make him weary, giving him fears of his weight cracking them; the crack-ridden, damp roof above him--or, at least, the parts of it yet to fall to the ground--forces his gaze upwards, to watch for tumbling debris; and, of course, how could he prevent himself from staring into the gloom before him, watching for something to burst from the darkness with murderous eyes, spit dripping from its mouth and a blade gripped tightly in its hand?

      What he once saw as beautiful, wearing the silky blindfold that was love, he now sees as something to be wary of, to watch for danger in; nothing is pure in this place.

      And then, just as the heavy beating of his heart is joined by an eerie sound--the roof preparing to fall? The floor ready to give way? A rabid beast up ahead ready to tear into his flesh?--he wakes up and feels relief--until, that is, he remembers that he has woken only into a world scarily similar to the place he has just left.   

Author's Note

Please ignore any grammar problems present in this story.
'Aschervine' is a term--or, to be exact, a world--that I'd like to touch on in later stories.
You might disagree, but I've realised that my prose is a lot more poetic now than it was when I released by first short story, 'Bleeding Paper'. Y'see, I've been reading a bit of Clive Barker, and have started to try using his kind of style. Be sure to let me know which style you prefer.
I hope that you enjoyed this story.