“Aaron—” My mom sits on the bed, pulls me as far into her lap as her size allows. She holds my head to her shoulder—wraps an arm around me while I shake. “I’m so sorry, Aaron. I… I’m so,so sorry.”
“No, no, no!He’s not dead.Please!Please!I can’t…I can’t take this.”
I can barely hear Felix over my screams—my sobs—but he’s on the floor across the room, being held up by Kayla—not any better than me as he mourns his best friend.
“He died on impact—he didn’t suffer.” Amber offers, trying to ease the pain. I wail.
“Benjamin!”
Eventually the nurses sedate me, and when I dream, I do not return to that little villa. To the life I belong to. To my husband.
???
As I reflectnow, there are several things that should have tipped me off in my coma life. For example—there is no way I was able to afford all of the jewelry and real estate I was buying. Even with my parents’ help. Let alone a honeymoon to Fiji. And how quickly everyone dropped the fact that wejumped off a fucking bridge? Or the night terrors Benjamin kept having—the one where he was falling to his death with his parents’ dead bodies, and I would wake him up and save him every time. What was it I said?
“Until then—I’ll keep saving you before you hit the ground.Just keep yelling for me.”
Ha—right. And when I brought him to our house for the first time? Didn’t he… he told me. He warned me. But I couldn’t take it.
I wouldn’t believe it.
“I think I died on the bridge.”
“What?!”
“You don’t understand me, Aaron.I’ve been alive for 22 years and
until recently I’ve never…I’ve never been allowed this kind of happiness.Not like this.Not so much at once.So either the world is going to end, or I died and the universe is making up for all its wrongdoings by letting me play out my fantasies.”
On his twenty-second birthday…
“I was supposed to kill myself next year……But now the thought of not being with you—even in the obliviousness of death—is so much harder to bear than any bad thing that has ever happened to me.”
I made it all up. I made up a whole two years of my life and placed my dead boyfriend in it. My dead boyfriend whose dead body saved my life. He succeeded. He followed in his parents’ footsteps—even if in the end he wanted to come down. Even if in the end he wanted tolive. To be with me.
Felix’s wedding—my wedding. The happiness and the family we were all building. Gone. Everyone is devastated—no one wants to celebrate me surviving. Not when they buried Benjamin a fewweeks ago… I didn’t even get to attend the funeral. I was out for three weeks. My parents are sympathetic but mostly paranoid that I’ll do something reckless. My friends are too coddling, so I avoid them. And Felix… He doesn’t really talk to me. Not when he asked me to admit Benjamin and I refused. And now he’s dead.
He doesn’t know that I was going to. I was going to admit him that day. But it doesn’t matter. He’s right, I should have admitted him in the beginning. If I had—if I’d listened to Fe—Benjamin would be alive. I know Felix blames me a bit in that regard, but he doesn’t want me to see it—he feels guilty that he thinks that way. So, he doesn’t talk to me in general. I can’t blame him.
I can’t go home. I can’t go to our apartment and smell him there—see his shadow in the hall and lay in our bed. Look at his clothes and sit on the couch we’ve laid on together countless times. I’ve been staying in a motel—I’ve been falling apart.
My whole life—my whole purpose has always been a future with him. It has always been Benjamin. One simply cannot exist without the other. And now here I am: one half of an intertwined soul—holding on to broken fragments of him. My phone discarded so I won’t see his picture—the doors locked so no one can come in.
What is my reason now? What is my purpose?
I can still see—can still hear every time he’s laughed in the last two years. The two years of my dream—of our life together. I can still see that smile and feel him beneath me. A beautiful, peaceful life that no longer belongs to me yet tortures me all the same.
Another Aaron’s eternity. And this one is mine. Left to suffer alone. Left with a soaring blue bird and the knowledge that not only could I have saved him—but in the end I had talked him down.He was coming down.Coming home. It was not a suicide. It was an accident. I told this to the cops when I was questioned, yet with his history, I’m not sure how convinced they were—but it was ruled an accident in the end.
There’s a knock at the motel-room door.
“Aaron?” It’s my mother. I open the door acrack.
“Yes?” She sighs—she looks tired.
“Please talk to me. Please let me in. It’s been days since your release.”
“I’m busy.”
