Ghost rubs his thumb over his chin.
“The love feeling is one head fuck of an emotion, brother. Just roll with it,”
“Roll with it, ya reckon?”
“Yep, but hold the fuck on. You know how crazy that ride gets.”
“That’s what scares me. Replacing that love with this one and making either one of them cry.”
“81, you know that ghosts don’t cry, aye?”
“Well, you know Hannah, brother. She wasn’t normal in human form, so ghost form is just as much of a head fuck,” I say as he walks away from the room. Knowing what I need to do, I slam back the last of the beer. Walking from church, I take a bottle of whiskey with me and head to the cemetery. I gotta break up with a ghost.
I spin the cap off the bottle of whiskey after placing some supermarket-bought Iris down for my love and a new hot wheel car for my little guy.
“We gotta have some words, baby girl,” I say taking a long swig of the amber liquid. It burns going down.
“I was trying hard to hold onto you, for as long as I could. But, baby, you’re slipping. You were my fix on the days when things were broken. But she, this little bird, she is a healing that I didn’t know I was looking for. I swear, baby. It’s beautiful, so beautiful to look at. But then there is you and my baby boy. The separation anxiety that I feel for you both is like playing explosives. I want you so bad even though I know you will kill me. I want her just that little bit more now, babe. She is a star that I was waiting for and you, my love, were the fire that burned me. You were so damn hot. All of my life I was told I was a worthless piece of shit, so tell me… how did I get the two greatest loves of my life?”
A cold breeze blows around me, stirring up the fallen leaves. I know she’s here. I feel her warmth laced in a dark shivering cold.
“You promised to love me forever. You lied, Henry. You look! I’m laying here in this cold, dead.” Her voice is bitter as it wrapped its tight grip around my heart and squeezed so damn tight that I was struggling to breathe.
“No, Hannah. I loved you to the point of death. You, my love, you did this.”I struggle to get out as my lungs erupt with a searing fire.
“Every day's harder, here alone in the cold. I’ve been trying to change. I was trying to change, Henry, but you see then, and even now, I really been feeling the urge. Dealing with all the demons, I’ve been hearing them speaking like you do, baby. And popping all of the good shit just to deal with the nerves of it all. How was I meant to stop when I was so deep in love?” she speaks, her voice falls around me, suffocating me.
“Well, Hannah, you made it so I don't know who I am anymore. I feel like the past is always knocking at my door. Bound by these chains, my old habits won't let go of me, baby, but I need you to allow me to let you go. Because at the end of the day you didn’t deserve to have what I gave you.”
It breaks me to speak these words to her. Because in the dark moments I still press her clothing to my lips and think about the way I couldn’t face life without her until the night she chose not to fight.
“Save your breath, Henry,” she says as my mouth opens to plead with her to save me by letting me go.
“I'm somewhere between the man I was and who I wanna be. But you make it a real struggle with my own recovery, Hannah. Look and listen, I’m trying to find inner peace. I’m trying to find a way to quiet my need to feed the inner beast. And my backs against the wall. I could lose it all. I could lose her if I don’t lose you, baby. I can’t do this with you anymore. There's a freedom that's involved but every time I fall, I feel so damn hopeless. Why do I always feel so hopeless when it comes to you.?”
“You love it, Henry. You love the way this makes you feel. Me. The way we were and the way we are now. What do you feel, baby, when you sit here and beg me to fuck you? To come back and take you. You say you need her, that this little bird is your rehab but yet it’s me you fall down on your knees to when the dark is too much… when your dick’s hard for the darkness and she’s too charming to feed it. To quell it back down to flaccid”
“You say I love it, but it's really because I need it, Hannah. You caused me to have a deadly and unhealthy addiction. This fucking addiction, I keep feeding it because I can't not have this feeling. This god damn feeling that you made me become so reliant on. I fucking hate it but I feel like I can't beat it. Because then I lose it all, don’t I? I have to say goodbye to you but in that same breath I have to say goodbye to our boy. You make me wanna drop a forty-five and snort a line. If I could fly away this evening I fucking would, because, Hannah, you make me wanna overdose.”
“I make you hard and you love it. Be aware of what you wish for, Henry, because once I’m gone there is no coming back.”
“Well, sweet devil, it was once you, but now it’s her. Only her and I. She exhales and I inhale.”
Swigging back another gulp of the burning whiskey, the moon begins to rise kissing goodnight to the blood-orange sun. As I pour the last of the whiskey over her grave she stands before me. I rise to my feet and pull her into me as my mind struggles to hold back second thoughts of letting her go.
Dark circles under pasty white cheeks greets me as I kiss her deathly cold lips.
“Goodbye, my love, and thank you for the ride.”
I watch her eyes as the moonlight danced with unshed tears.
“Please don’t. Please don’t do this, Henry. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t forget me, Henry, or this.” Her arms wave around us.
“I won’t forget him. I will come and see him but I gotta let you go, Hannah. I need to, so I can survive the love that Jade wants to give me.”
She falls to her knees as a wail left her lungs.
My hand fall to my baby boy’s headstone.
