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It's changing. Everything's changing.
I'll miss this sky, this dirt, and this pair of small socks. Maybe I wasn't meant to be – but to be fleeting. There isn't enough time in the day and I miss my son.
Staring at me, is a bright eye and a loud one. The solitary mouth of this creature terrifies me. I feel tears at my eyes and my lips but I still sit down on the bench. It becomes 8 PM and the light flickers on – the P.A. squeaks an Elvis reverie from the fifties and then the fake sound of crickets chirping. I am in the jaws of hell; the Devil has me between her teeth.
There is an endless familiarity in the dampness of my skin that does not correlate with the snow, but I can't forget it. I won't. There is a path that calls to me which I cannot find: he speaks over the crackle of the fire.
"Hank."
It is a meaningless gesture— a waste of breath. One that fills the gaps between kisses and intimate moments or the resolution of an end. One that hoards energy and gets high. "Hank", he says, "your clothes are soaking wet."
I wipe my dripping hair from my face and sniff: the boots I wear remind me of my step-father and the weeds I'm crushing beneath them remind me of me.
"Do you like the rain, Connor?", I ask. "The snow?" He stares at me, unanswering. His wristwatch ticks silently and I find myself flinching each time the number seven is passed.
"I'll dry off overnight", I tell him, rubbing my hands just above the fire.
"Or get hypothermia", he counters, crossing his arms. "Let's go back."
I shake my head and reach down to grab the small bottle of gin I'd brought with me. "Five more minutes."
It is so easy to not realise the loss of a child. You could be staring at their shoes, watching the way they get up to sit in the passenger seat, and you wouldn't notice the lack of existence. The lack of empathy. The lack of anything... I glance at Connor. When you see it, all there is is the dead shell of what something once or never was.
"Alright", he stands and brushes the snow off of his thighs, "We're leaving. It's far too cold for you to be out here."
I wonder if physicists sit in their labs all day just trying to get the world to stop – just to catch their breaths.
"I don't remember starting the fire", I breathe, I feel, I state. "Do you?"
"Yes", Connor replies, now frowning. "You asked me to start it."
"I don't remember that, either."
There is a sick feeling you get when you haven't eaten all day, like the confines of your insides are swallowing themselves up: like your intestines are strangling the blood from your vital organs. I gag, almost, and let my drink crush the leaves and pillowed grass. The lack of light frames the shadows of his face and to an untrained eye, he would appear static: emotionless and empty. To my eye, his eyes are the broken glass I crawl across to reach my fridge every morning. He reflects a sadness with the same weight of the 27 Club.
"Are you mocking me?", I ask. "Is that why you're here?"
His eyebrows furrow and his lips part; disbelief is an untimely, slow crescendo on his features that looks as though it inhabits a different species.
"No, I-… no, why would you even think that?"
The bottom row of my teeth ache. The bottle of gin at my feet sinks into the grass and my mouth tastes like bitter sleep. He sits down beside me and I wonder if the fire feels warm against his skin. His hands grip my shoulder and knee, like a dot-to-dot. I wince.
There is a pain that swallows my nerves, I think, and the warmth of his hands is like scalding metal cauterising a wound. I look away: I miss my son.
There is a lack of understanding hidden somewhere underneath the sheets of snow and ice that toughen the ground: something like a natural facelift for the cracks and roots. There is a stillness in this place that is difficult to ignore. Even when you close your eyes, the knowledge that it exists is troublesome. It keeps you awake and watching. It keeps you listening to the promises travelling through aging dirt.
I feel empty. And there is no surety. I am alone. I am so alone. I can't remember the words that have been promised to me and perhaps that is a blessing.
It is tiresome to carry an injury appearing as an area of discoloured skin on the body, caused by a blow or impact rupturing underlying blood vessels. It is tiresome to even think. My hand falls asleep.
It is too much about the conviction or lack thereof. Forgetting who you are to become what someone needs you to be: they say that's what it means to be alive. I don't want that.
It is whispered in the corner of this park where only I can hear it. Where I can let my eyes sting. Where I keep turning and turning and turning and getting lost between streets in a city which never sleeps and the shop windows become foggy because my breath is uneasy and I am fleeting. I am so cold: that is the feeling.
"I'm afraid", I admit. "What would it be like without the pain?"
The painting I think of most often is a shade of blue I wouldn't be able to categorise unless I saw it with my own two eyes. I don't understand the lines or the eye or the bird on a mission all through and past the sky.
My blood won't reach my feet. The moonlight doesn't leave an impression on the sky.
It is in a blink and in one motion. Mild-mannered, soft-spoken and average in every respect; Connor has the eyes of a former dreamer. Does he feel dragged towards the ocean? Like James Cook or Matthew Maury?
"You would die quickly", the words have been deftly sharpened under his tongue, "Pain only exists to alert the mind that the body is in danger of being damaged. Physical pain is just a feedback loop. Without it, you could slice open your leg, never notice it, and bleed out."
How is comfortability a factor when there are more pressing uses of space within my brain? How is the pressuring insistence on the left side of my chest more valued in importance than mourning my son?
"Emotional pain is, in all respects, the same", Connor rolls his shoulders, his hands long ago having slid back to his own pockets. "To function well, a human is required to have a sense and understanding of emotional and social interactions. Like physical pain, emotional pain is an awareness of a social or emotional situation that is dangerous. Without this, someone could find themselves in a bad relationship or around dangerous people. Pain is a survival instinct. After understanding pain, one learns to fear, because pain hurts. And without pain the chances of someone surviving drops dramatically."
"You sound like a machine", my voice cracks. I am going through puberty at 52. "Do you always sound like this?"
"You have feelings, but you don't like them", his persistence is a migraine. "Not because they go against your whole idea of building up so many walls that you become an emotionless brick, but because they create a reality outside of the one you exist in. You feel depression, loneliness, and a lack of worth. It's common for someone to believe that the way they portray themselves will almost always not match up with who they truly perceive themselves as, and you believe that you want to return to being a different person, one who experienced happiness. What was that individual like? What did they do with their time? You want to go back to a time where your son was still with you."
"I don't want to think anymore."
The landscape around us stutters; a strange thing in itself. Things don't stutter anymore, nothing has stuttered for decades. The trees trip and fall down stones, crashing into the shadow of the moon and spreading an organic carnage of leaves and wood. My surroundings begin to collapse.
"You think if you pretend to be the old you, that you can replace everything that was and get some peace of mind."
"I don't care about anything."
"Wrong", listening to his voice makes me feel as though he could crumble rocks between his teeth. "You care about yourself, you care about Cole and you care about me."
"I just want to be myself again."
"What's stopping you?"
"I'm not sure I know", I say quietly.
There's a sensation far from unencumbered and daringly close to overwhelmed. It teeters on the edges of roads, on the sills of windows and on the barricades by rooftops. It crawls through what feels like could be veins in my forearms, but what must only be superior wiring by God. A predetermined, controlled environment encased in a walking mistake. The moon doesn't create a sensation on my skin but beneath that I can feel everything in me whirring to stop; the streetlight makes more of an impression on me than the fire does.
I think the term is alienation, because dissociation is too humane and I'm not ready to take that step—I can't even move my feet. Even if I wanted to, it's like a firewall in front of my eyes: red with block letters and underlines.
"Hank? Hank?"
I open my eyes. Connor watches me wearily and the snow pelts down in harsh, icy bullets.
"I think I understand how I felt that night when you found me in the kitchen", frost crawls inside my lungs, "I feel like I'm on a cliff that's always been there but I can't see the edge."
"It's not your fault Cole's gone", Connor's hand reaches my shoulder again. "It's never been your fault, but what you're doing now is your fault. You don't have to let him go, or try replicating what you had, because you just have to accept that you'll never get that feeling back. You have to make a new normal, Lieutenant. No matter how much it hurts."
There is a lump in my throat that I am forced to swallow.
"Cole, he...", I squeeze my eyes shut, towards the sky. "He always wore these stupid, spotty socks— he never even wanted to take them off: I had to bribe him. God, I just miss him so much."
"I know", Connor's arms slide around my chest and shoulders, "and you won't ever forget him."
If the world ended now, I think I'd want to be one of those people out there standing on the roads and looking up at the sky. Would there be fire? Even in June? Or would it just rain some kind of burning acid? Would someone up there watch us drown and choke on poison? I clear my throat.
"You're right, let's just go back home."