The Last Visit - Lyrical Prose, Experimental Narrator Voice, Critique Please (cw: suicide)
Posting here, I tried posting elsewhere but no feedback.... This is the first piece from a larger project I'm working on. Episodic literary fiction, each chapter a different character and interior landscape.
The narrator is a place that is also a consciousness. It knows everything but intervenes in nothing.
Looking for honest feedback on three things specifically. Does the voice work and stay consistent. Does the emotional weight land?
You inhaled deep the day you first came here, sitting on the bench by the frozen pond. The cold air accepted you with a familiar comfort. Quiet. You kept your eyes closed, refusing the light, but watched its glow on your eyelids. The tungsten streetlamp cast a warm glow on the snow-covered path that followed the curve of the pond into the distance on either side of where you sat. There wasn't much here then. You breathed here a while. The streetlamp stayed on to light your steps as you walked away. The trees revealed themselves, emerging out of the darkness.
The amber glow welcomed you when you came only to walk. Your footsteps pressed a path through the snow revealing what you knew was once there. It deepened and widened with each curved contemplation. Sometimes you would sit and trace it with your eyes, the way you revealed the way through the snow.
The trees reached for the clouds one day and the clouds descended. You came to breathe, but the air was thicker. The quiet light held everything closer. You still walked, for a time, though the path was longer than before. You did not know when it changed.
The day the snow fell, you looked up for the first time. You stared at the pond as if holding onto something. The quiet settled with the first white layer on the path. Footsteps muffled as the ground swallowed each print.
Still you sat on the bench, snow gathered. There was no more walking. Snowflakes touched your face. You looked to the clouds and watched the snow cascade like falling stars. The light dimmed.
The blizzard was heavy. Consuming.
You woke in your room alone. The alarm hadn't rung yet, but you knew. You lay a moment in the silence of a decision made. The ceiling looked the same as always. The room looked the same as always. Outside, the world was preparing itself for an ordinary day.
You let it.
The day moved the way days do. Nobody saw the blizzard. It was here, in me, the snow churning, the lamp straining, the bench buried and the pond invisible beneath chaos. You walked through your day. I roared quietly.
You came home.
Tonight a hot shower felt just right. A little longer than normal but that didn't matter. You took your time enjoying the steam, breathing in that hot heavy air. You used all of that shower gel, the one that smells like fresh flowers. Your favourite. A hair wash after, with a slow scalp massage, fingers working in small circles the way you liked.
Out of the shower and dried off. You dressed in your comfiest clothes. The ones that make you feel safe.
You pulled the covers back on your perfectly made bed and got in. A deep sniff of the freshly washed sheets. One of the small things. One of the things that was always enough, on the right kind of day.
You took your sleeping pills at the same time as always. But tonight it was different.
You turned off the lamp on the bedside table.
I have been here since the first time you found me. You arrived the way people arrive at places they didn't know they were looking for. You sat on this bench and the air was still and everything was blanketed in snow. I became what you needed.
You came back many times.
Sometimes you walked in circles, your boots making that soft crunch in the fresh snow, your eyes down watching each step. Sometimes you sat here gazing at the pond and let the lamp do what it could against the dark.
The blizzard came before. Once. The lamp flickered and steadied. I steadied with it. Not yet.
Today the snow fell before you came.
You sit on the bench.
How warm this cold place feels tonight. Your eyes trace the pond, the place where the path was, the snow coming down soft through the canopy above. Almost a sunset. Almost warm. Almost enough.
It was enough. For a time.
The amber glow has started to flicker.
It only did that once before. That day it didn't feel right. Not yet. You weren't certain then.
You watch the snow fall gently.
I watch you watching it.
It falls the way it did when it first began. Patient. Beginning, somewhere at the edges of this place, to fill what you leave behind.
The lamp flickers with the snow and the world appears still.
The crack is small.
The light went out