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“Oh, love, how beautiful and tragic,
won’t you hold me tight tonight?”
Under an archway adorned with flower garlands, standing in front of the mahogany pews of a church — those lyrics had never been sweeter. Your fingertips ghosted mine, an overzealous promise that eternity was ours to keep, that the hands of the clock would turn back just for us. The ring, golden under the afternoon sunlight, slipped easily onto my finger, like the serrated edge of a knife running through butter. Joyous laughter was the saccharine sweet melody that played through the halls. Perhaps, I should have realised that it was almost too easy.
You turned to me, eyes alight in the heat of the moment, the joy of the occasion. There were pictures to take, you had told me, dragging me by the hand as my heels snagged on fine white lace that was too long. The bleat of a camera shutter, like a gunshot. Or maybe a nail in the coffin where my desecrated heart lay, torn apart and flayed to the artery.
That song. Oh, love, how beautiful and tragic… It warbled out of speakers littered around the venue, akin to a broken record, but not that I minded. It was a reminder that this is real, that I was eating a three-tiered cake in a pretty cream-coloured dress whilst standing between my parents. Their smiles peeked out from behind the food on their plates, half-moon crescents hanging from their jaws. It would soon fade, just like the wax and wane of the moon, until gritted teeth were hidden behind thin lips.
Everything is foggy now, like a polaroid that’s spent too long under the sun. The faces are shaky blotches of peach and ivory, the balloons and presents nothing more than pops of colour. Don’t worry, your face has stayed the same — a melancholy portrait touched by the hands of tragedy and the beauty of an era long gone.
Perhaps I had known that there would be an end; perhaps that’s the reason why my smile was stretched too wide and my grasp of your hands too firm, my laughter too loud and too raucous. It was me holding on to the thin end of a wire about to snap, trying to mend what was already broken and ruined.
You drove us home, fingers steepled on the steering wheel, as you turned to look at me in the rear view mirror. A smile graced your lips, cruel and beautiful and tragic and all the things love is. I smiled back. A veil of false hope covered my worry and blinded my eyes to the trouble lurking on the horizon. You were like a drug, heady and addicting every time I took a hit of it, filling my veins with utter bliss while our love and your promise turned to ash around me. You were like a drug, leaving me prone to the inevitable crash after the high.
There are friends, of course; friends who come around with sad, downtrodden smiles and arms laden with gifts that scream a perfunctory I’m sorry for your loss, friends who send text after text filled with doves and olive branches and I’ll be there for you, friends who do all this and then get back to their lives while mine stays rooted in the soil of your loss.
That song — how does it go? Oh, love, how beautiful and tragic… My ears are stained with the words, big black blotches that refuse to leave my head, circling and circling like waiting vultures ready to pick apart prey. Every word, every syllable is an arrow slicing cleanly into the tender flesh of my heart, bleeding like an open and gaping wound that just won’t close. I always take great care to stitch it back up — then my eyes shift to the photograph lying on the countertop, the stitches split at the seams and the wound opens again, fresh and angry as ever. Phantom heartache courses through my body.
Metal scattered across the tarmac, twisted and grotesque as amber flames licked their edges. The road was a canvas and blood acrylic. You were the painter. My gaze locked onto yours, but it was dead and frosty. Your still hands remained poised on the battered steering wheel, and it almost felt like a mockery from the universe. You would die with a smile on your face, hands still on the wheel and a false promise in your heart.
The paramedics and first responders, doctors and nurses could do nothing to make your heart beat again. Before it was a vessel of joy and love, and now, reduced to a broken organ and decaying tissue and drying blood. I look down, and your blood is on my hands even after weeks. Not really, but I can feel it there.
You’re still beautiful, of course. I think tragedy only made you more so. Before you were something intimately familiar, something that I recognised, but death has made you a painting to be remembered, a sculpture in the glass case of a museum. You are hung on my wall and I have paid a heavy price to keep you. No one gets to gaze upon you other than me, but I am your painter and the one who will leave you to collect dust in the hollowed walls of my heart, and the exhibition of my pain.
“Oh, love, how beautiful and tragic,
won’t you hold me tight tonight…”