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I've forgotten the details.
All the small things. The tiny things I never even knew I knew. What colour were those eyes? What was the sound of that laugh? The tone of that anger?
Sometimes I still hear it. There's a voice that haunts me (It's in the darkness, when I can hear it whisper to me in the night.). But I've lost the details. I've lost the meaning. I've forgotten the importance.
I don't think I wanted it to be like this. Is it easier to forget? Is it easier to move on, if you think the world you came from wasn't real?
That made it easier for Sam. I think, that was why he did what he did. What I could never, ever do.
There's a hole inside me, but I can't remember enough to fill it. My parents, Molly, nothing I could do was ever enough. And now I'm forgetting, and it's still not enough. Nothing could ever be enough.
That voice in the dark still calls to me. As if (If I tried. Can I try? Do I want to try?) I could remember. There's part of me that wants to remember. I always hoped that, if I were gone, that world would go on without me. It was a comfort, something that made it okay to leave. It made it real. Can it still be real if I don't remember it?
Days here just go on. I go to work. I come home. I drink, I tuck Molly in bed (She's too old for that, “I don't need a kiss, Mummy, I'm all grown up now.”). I think about how someone needed me once.
And in the night, I hear his voice. He calls me to someplace that might have been home, if I'd wanted it to be.
I haven't forgotten Gene Hunt. But I've forgotten all that was important about him. The sound of his voice, the curve of his smile; what colour were his eyes? I think by forgetting I condemned him to that dark. I wonder if he still lives on, somewhere, without me (When does a thought take a life of its own?) or maybe he is now nothing more than an echo in the shadows. Always there. Always reminding me of what it is to lose something I never knew I had to begin with.