Soulpiercer
An unrequited drabble
What will it take for you to leave me? You don’t even want to be here.
I have crossed mountains.
I have fought wars to let you go.
Every night, I pray.
Where is our salvation sleeping? When will this chain be crushed beyond repair?
I don’t even know if you can feel its chill. After all, you never fell in love. Or, if you did, you never let me know.
Yet even now, I’d take you if you asked. If somehow you returned, rang me, wrote me a letter.
You and your stupid kindness.
You and your enchanted face.
Thanks for reading…
…and a big welcome to explorers old and new!
2025 marks 250 years since Jane Austen was born. I’ll write about her again later in the year - her actual anniversary is in December - but, for this story, I first took inspiration from Wentworth’s famous letter in Persuasion. If you know, you know.
I hesitate to call my drabble true romance, though. For one thing, it’s hardly the genre’s usual happy ending.
For another, it crosses into literary fiction: character-driven, using poetic language. The ‘chill’ chain comes from ‘The Prisoner’, a powerful poem by Emily Brontë - and the ‘you’ in this drabble has an ‘enchanted’, not enchanting, face.
It’s deliberately constraining. My main inspiration, here, was a side character in the novel I’m writing. He’s ace, and doubly heartbroken by the revelation of a) his love being unrequited and b) having to grieve what he had thought his life would be.
His arc therefore involves reclaiming his soul. I’m still toying with the idea of a piece of it being literally caught in the meadow/stuck in the grass.
But it’s definitely a fight for him, to get his beloved out of his mind - even, almost, an addiction.
Next Time:
A tarot tale.
Copyright © E.A. Colquitt 2025.
No AI was used in the creation of this work. No portion of this work may be used for training AI without written permission from the author.