The people will show up eventually, bursting like sardines through that front door, and I’ll be forced to face them, to smile, not be a cunt, and pretend that I’m not dying inside.
I make my way to our bedroom, and the door creaks as it opens.
“I promise I’ll oil the hinges,”I told her a few months ago, and she’d smiled and shaken her head. Erin knew me better than I knew myself. She’d been through it all before.
I open the curtains. Light streams into the space, but it does nothing to take away the darkness that now settles in this room. Or is it the darkness I feel inside, the suffocating gloom that fills my being?
This room is, after all, a place void of life and emotion now. Maybe I did all this? Perhaps me loving her is what killed her eventually? Or was it our pasts and how they haunted us both? We were never truly free. Too much left unsaid and undone. We were on a loop, Erin and me.
We tried to let go of the ghosts, but they continually crept up from the shadows, pulling us farther and farther into the dark.
All I wanted was to give her the will to live, to go on, to exist. To show her that someone still needed her here. That I cared, not because I had to, but because I wanted to. She deserved that after all she’d lost. After all I'd taken away from her.
A gentle knock sounds,and I turn to face the door. It opens slightly, and my heart sinks to the pit of my stomach. Sunshine stands in my bedroom, in the midst of my hell.
We look at each other across the distance, and neither of us dares make a move. Moving means something would need to be said, or done. We both stare, neither having to say a word because we know what the other is thinking. It’s been years. Years since I saw those strands of gold and those eyes as blue as the ocean.
She was still bright and beautiful and all the things I would never be. But she was also cold, hard, and lost in a world where I’d broken her heart, and she never understood why.
“They’re waiting for you.” Her voice is soft, delicate almost, like listening to “Clair de Lune.” Like a gentle lullaby. I want to hear more. I want to listen to it forever.
Would it be so wrong if I embrace her?
Years, years, years, it’s been years, I remind myself.
She holds out her hand. A truce, I wonder for a split second, and then I meet her gaze, and her eyes are no longer a lagoon blue. They are the color of the raging ocean, angry, unforgiving. I fear I’ll drown in it, be swept away out to sea, never to return.
I take her hand anyway. I rub a thumb over her knuckles, and I bend to kiss it in reverence.
She doesn’t pull away, but I know she felt nothing.
She turns away, leading me down the small dim passage into my crowded living room. The living room I share with my dead wife, Erin.
The living room I met her in. The living room which held memories of conversations, laughter, and tears shed in the cloak of night.
Pictures cover the walls. Erin loves pictures. She said if she could not capture time in a bottle, this was the only alternative.
“I am dying, but you are not.”Such cruel words slipped from her lips in the end. It was she who deserved to live. All I ever do is destroy everything in my path. I am not good. I am not honorable. I am nothing.
People turn to stare at me, nodding, offering me sympathetic smiles. My mother walks around with trays of sandwiches, and it all makes my insides churn. She understands this well. They turn their attention to me, looking between Hayley and me. What must they think? He’s moved on so quickly.
Sunshine lets go of my hand, and my heart goes with it. I watch as she weaves her way through the small crowd, exiting my front door, and even though I know I shouldn’t follow her, I do.
