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“The first one is always the hardest…”
It’s nights like these when your own words hit you the hardest; the deepest. You still remember the night you said that to her, so very many years ago now… She had come to you in Paris – that time you had considered yourself a painter. She had woken, screaming in the darkness for a ghost she could no longer touch and you had gone to her, fresh oil paint still tacky on your fingertips. “It’s okay, I’m here,” you whispered into the tangle of her hair as you knelt down beside her on the mattress and scooped her up into your arms, folding her up in an embrace that was meant to comfort, but also anchor. Her cheeks shone with fresh tears as she pulled slightly away, gazing up at you with a fierce determination that overshadowed any embarrassment she might have felt in that moment. Stroking a couple of fingers through her hair you smiled – that smile that was kindred in a way that only two such as you could possibly understand. “The first one is always the hardest,” you had said, with just a bit more sadness than you had intended. She blinked a couple of times and you could practically see the gears of her mind turning slowly, as if attempting to assimilate the words to their meaning.
“The first?” She asked, her voice scratched and dry from fitful sleep.
“The first one you love who dies,” you supplied gently, still holding her in the shadows of the longest night of her life.
Her face paled slightly and you instantly regretted saying it, perhaps it was still too soon for her; too fresh – too raw. A breath hitched in her throat and her fingers clawed at the front of your shirt, as if she was desperately trying to keep herself from falling apart in front of you. You – the one person who understood better than anyone else. “It gets easier, after,” you added, quieter this time, as if trying to convince you both that it was true. She did fall apart after that and you sat there with her for hours, holding her together well beyond the first murky rays of a new day.
Tessa had always considered you a friend, but it was that day that officially stamped your name on her heart. Over the years you’ve travelled literal worlds apart, living separate lifetimes that often intersected but never intertwined and the bond that connected you never diminished, never severed. Not even a little bit.
It will be years and years into your future when she comes to you again, only this time it will not be her that is screaming for a ghost, but you.
Most people wait their entire lives to find the missing sliver of their own soul – that tiny little piece of themselves that is hidden deep within the soul of another.
You had waited several.
Fate is like that sometimes, isn’t it? Just when you think you’ve given up, in walks that missing piece, as if they had been there all along, waiting for you to be ready. You were ready. You were more than ready and you dived in headfirst, hard and fast and reckless because that was your way. For better or worse you were there, and you had certainly been dealt your fair share of both before time had slipped through your fingers once again.
Your life together read like the very best story, you know the sort – the ones filled with danger and excitement and love—so much love. From the very first moment you saw him you knew. You knew he was going to be the death of you and still you leapt.
Because, how could you not?
Never before had you met someone with so much love and so much devotion all wrapped up in an attractive, albeit unconventional package and you accepted him, all of him, and held on so tightly that it was now impossible to let go. You had taken his youth in stride and basked in it, riding that high through the best life you would ever live. He had come into your life and seen you for exactly what you are – all of your holes and imperfections that he simply absorbed with his love in that way of his – the one that still took your breath away, even now. He willingly gave you his entire life and you took it, desperate and greedy and aching for more.
Aching. That wasn’t what this was, not exactly. Aching would suggest that there was still something left to hurt, but there wasn’t because he had taken everything with him when he left. Be happy, he had whispered in a voice that was so hollow that it had chilled you to the bone, age-weathered fingers curled loosely around your own. Live.
Live, he had said, as if he didn’t know you at all.
And then he had left you. Left you all alone to fend for yourself and for a sliver of a moment, you hated him. Hated him for loving you and hated him for leaving you, too.
“The last one is always the hardest,” comes a familiar voice in the darkness and you violently clamp a hand across your mouth to hold in the desperate and broken sobs that shake your entire body.
You say nothing at all as she comes to you, sinking down in the corner beside your huddled form. “I’m here,” she says as she folds her arms around you and holds you tight and although you do not say it, you appreciate her leaving out the part about it being okay because it will never be okay.
You will never be okay.
For a long while neither of you says anything at all. She holds you in the shadows that grow taller with each passing second hand and you sob without restraint, dark streaks of long-forgotten mascara carved harshly across your cheeks. It is longer still, before you trust yourself to speak and even then it comes out as a scratchy, broken whisper that burns your throat. “The last.” You repeat, and it is not a question because you think you understand what you both already know.
The last one you love who dies.