Rain lashed against the plastic cover,
a relentless counterpoint to the gold of the sun,
the kind of day that mirrored the mayhem inside me
a tempestuous mix of despair and fleeting hope.

There, across a chipped table at the damp park, sat her.
Tears, glistening like shattered diamonds,
traced paths down her porcelain cheeks.
my insides twisted with a pang of something akin to shame,
a foreign feeling in the wasteland of my mind.
My own thoughts were a polluted river,
choked with the debris of self-pity and denial.

“Poison,” she rasped, her voice a mere whisper lost in the drumming rain.
“Coursing through my veins, a sweet, seductive melody promising oblivion.”
Her eyes, the colour of a stormy sky, locked with mine.
A flicker of recognition, or perhaps a shared understanding
of the abyss we both teetered on the edge of.

I scoffed, a dry, hollow sound.
“Polluting the last dregs of my brain with cheap aquavit,” I muttered,
watching the world through the transparent liquid.
The truth was far more damning
I was trying to drown the reminiscences, the doubts,
the suffocating emptiness, the wishful end.

“Good day,” she said, her voice barely audible yet strangely resolute.
A ghost of a smile played on her lips.
It wasn’t a joyous smile, not by a long shot.
It was the bitter grin of someone who
had stared into the abyss and found a twisted amusement there,
a dark echo of the despair that gnawed at my own soul.

We both laughed, a harsh, brittle sound,
that scraped against the already frayed edges of the day.
My laughter was a bitter cocktail of self-loathing and regret.
Hers, a sour note laced with a desperate defiance.
It was a symphony of broken things,
a duet sung by two lost souls clinging to the wreckage of their lives.