Work Text:
0.
I think that there is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.
1.
I write to you on the side of the bed, crumpled over paper, my hands frantically scribbling words that I won’t be able to translate when the morning comes, to the rhythm of your halting breaths.
2.
These are letters to you, who is my husband, you, who is my grief, you, who is my rage; in my mind, everyone I’ve ever loved is crystal-clear until I reach to touch them, to pull them into my embrace, and they swirl into nothing but thick, black smoke.
3.
Darling, I love you dearly.
Darling, I don’t know how you could love as I do you, I don’t know how you could look inside of my haunted house and find something worth saving, but you did—you went to the hardware store, bought a hammer and started removing the boards from the windows, begging to know me better, begging to come closer.
And I let you.
I shouldn’t have, I shouldn’t have put you here, I shouldn’t have done this to you. If I loved you, I would let you go and stop subjecting you to this cruelty. I am the only one bound to this place, I am the ghost in the haunted house. I clatter plates to scare you off, but you smile and stay, picking them off the floor and polishing them until they gleam and glisten for me.
4.
I was afraid to fall in love with you because you made me feel like I was on top of the world and that’s a very long way to fall when you realise what you’ve chained yourself to.
5.
Will I ever be enough?
6.
When I met you, I remember looking at you and thinking about a lot. How good your hand felt slotted in mine, how every time you smiled that I couldn’t help but want to kiss your lips, how I was so terrified that something would happen to you, whether you woke up feeling as if you had no future; whether you walked around drained of all meaning, whether you had to promise a thousand times not to die.
7.
I was always ashamed to take, and you always knew that, and I always gave and gave and gave and you knew it wasn’t a virtue: it was a disguise.
I don’t really know if I’ve survived, or if my inner self hasn’t just shut herself up by holding a fist to her throat and forgetting how to put it down, forgetting how to be a person outside of a function. I remember meeting you, I remember you unwinding me, and I remember thinking that you would teach me how. Today, I remember trying not to resent you for being unable.
You love me even when I don’t love myself and that’s a higher virtue than holding lives in your hands. I don’t want to be the one who mourns when everyone else has clearly forgotten. It’s mortifying. It’s mortifying to be the one who remembers, because you’re made to feel that your love—grief being the echo of your deepest love—is wrong.
I don’t want to feel wrong about missing him, and I know you don’t either. I fear that you’re going to do something wonderfully reckless and I am going to remember why I fell in love with you right as the blade comes down over your throat.
8.
His absence rips me open, salts old-fresh wounds, the kinks in my spine grow and I’ve never known how to heal myself, never known how to pull the sadness in me out like string; that’s always been you, wrenching your arm, sweat on your brow, and yelling about how everything’s going to be okay.
You could lead a blind man through a storm at sea and convince him, even as the ground became undone at his feet, that you were sitting in a grassy meadow, even as the wind screamed it’s challenge and the sharks and vipers surround you: I would feel safe in your embrace, even knowing we were to die.
Dying with you wouldn’t be a death at all, merely a minor hiccup.
9.
Last night, you laid your hands against me and asked me to tell you about my hurt, about the pain welling in my chest. You didn't ask me because you wanted to cure it, you asked me because you knew you couldn't.
You just wanted to witness, to stand as a silent co-pilot through the storm.
I shivered and forgot, kissing you instead. I don't think you forgot as easily, though. I don't think I did, either. I think I wanted to.
I think my pain is like having a handful of coloured pencils and wanting to draw a white egg. There's no white pencil, but you don't need a white pencil to draw a white egg, we already know the egg is white, we already know the paper is white. What I need to draw is the luminance of the yellow lamp above ot, and the reflection of the blue cloth and the shadows and the shading and the echoes of the egg's existence.
We know the egg is white, we know the paper is white, we know that pain hurts. You don't want me to tell you that it hurts, that I miss him, that I would give my own blood to hold him in my arms again, you know all of that.
You want to know how the pain affects me, how it shades and shadows and echoes me. You want me to draw around the egg.
I'm afraid.
10.
I’ve always been an older sister, I’ve always been one of three, I don’t know how to be two: I don’t want to be two. I won’t be two, I won’t forget, even if I speak his name in hushed tones, it’s enough. Even if I don’t sing along with the chapel of pain, of tricking yourself into thinking that forgetting will mask it, no—
It makes it worse. I keep him alive in my shards of memories. You die twice: once, when your heart stops, and a second time when your name is spoken for the last time, so I speak my little brother’s name and memory like a prayer every morning, attending a church of my own sins, of my own shortcomings. I knead his favourite colour into bread, stir his favourite song into my soup and season with how he’d always wear his hair.
I keep his eyes in my life.
11.
I hope there’s a liquor store waiting in the afterlife. I hope you’ll wait for me, twirling a cigarette between your fingers, waiting to light it with the stars. I hope you’ll make conversation, give all the hugs I couldn’t, hold onto all the people I couldn’t.
12.
I don’t know if I am grieving or angry.
I don’t know if I could forgive any of it.
13.
I am ashamed to say that I still think of it.
I am ashamed to say that yesterday, I cried so much that I woke up with swollen eyes. I am ashamed to say that I screamed in the kitchen, in the spring of the morning when no one else was up, I stuck my head into the filled sink and as I pulled out the plug, I screamed, then kept quietly cutting onions.
It's always surprising how still things can be, even when you're falling apart. Even when everything feels out of place, and you know it'll never come back to you again.
When you know that it's your fault, there's a strange resignation in that, I think.
Forgiveness is another way of saying that something didn't happen, and I refuse to give that to him, I refuse to deny the enormity of my pain, of my terror, of my grief and rage bundling together at the bottom of the simmering pot.
If I have to (and I do, I so desperately do) drag the weight of all the things that they ever did behind me, everywhere I go, so do they.
I do not know myself and it frightens me.
14.
I've been bad. Done things I shouldn't. These days, when I tell you that I love you, it means that I'm sorry for doing so. I daydream pain into myself, in the hopes that I'll be too tired when night finally falls to refuse your insistent gentleness when I need it (always, this I would never tell you).
It feels like this house is bound to burn down in a day or two, but it never does. Grab my hand and don’t look back.
15.
You're asking me what I want for breakfast and I'm telling you about how when the worst thing happened, I didn't even cry. Your hand wanders down my sharp shoulder blades, and you nod like you don't fault me for it.
You're handing me a shopping list and a bag of clothes to be laundered, and I'm passing you a bundle of letters that I wrote to God when I was fifteen and angry and afraid and lost and wanting to wring greatness from my own wrists.
You're passing me the milk for my coffee and apologising for how it tastes like shit because you haven't made it for years and I'm half-laughing about the undertaker's office and how there's actually a couch and it's made of blue tweed and I think he would have liked it, because he never really liked green.
You're trying to do normal things and I throw dull pieces of truth onto our kitchen table, stumbling over the words when I try to clear it, harshness clattering to the ground with pin-pricks of golden blood.
I can't lie anymore, even if I love you. There's things I've done and now they're everywhere and they're on the floor and you're leaning down to pick them up, uncaring of the risk of being cut. These are the things I've done and they're mostly sad, the ones that aren't always include you I promise, these are places I've been and they're mostly awful: mementos and trinkets from a life I never got to lead.
This life has woven itself into the notches and grooves of my curved spine and I hear it creak every time I stand up. I know I couldn't run if I tried, I know I should stop being sorry because you chose this more than me, but it doesn't feel like that.
It feels like I was falling and when you reached your hand out to save me, I gripped your wrist and pulled with me, calling it love and playing wedding bells to trick you into smiling as you plummeted.