Work Text:
Raindrops pelt the windshield as I drive us home. You’ve been quiet the last few days. Thinking, you said. Never a good sign, but God, you are beautiful when you’re lost. I want to follow you down those winding corridors to all the dead ends where I am not. I cannot be there and so I watch you puzzle it out when my eyes aren’t on the road (I’m so sorry), but watching is not the next best thing.
You trace patterns on my free hand, like you’re trying to remember something, or trying not to forget, trying to hold sand, its shapeless non-form sifted by the gaps. Like the lines on my fingers are the maze and you’ve broken the rules, woven yourself in between, cannot find your way alone. You were never looking for an out but I burn as brightly as any exit sign. Brighter still.
I don’t want to speak because the unspoken will hit the air with more weight behind it. I hold silence, solid and warm in my palm, but you will get your turn with it soon.
The ache that wrestles in my chest when I look at you, your eyes trapped on a runaway droplet, is not bone deep because a cage is meant to keep things inside and my heart is a writhing mass of rotted flesh birthing itself screaming from unbroken skin. It is distasteful in its desperation. It is impolite and I ask it to wait. You have your own awful needs, I know, and I cannot begrudge you them as hard as I try. I see you open your mouth to lay something to rest so I squeeze your hand (I used to feel love here. I want to beg you to tell me where I can find it again.) and ask you to tell me about it tomorrow. Today was so long and it’s getting late. We’ll be new people by morning.
I laugh and tell you how many of our cells will be different (It is .0391 percent which is both too few and too horribly many and I think that might be why you are thinking and why I have failed to stop us from reaching this point.), the imperceptible ways we will have unbecome (I want to believe that if I had tried harder I could have prevented this.) only to be remade anew (From the moment you fall asleep to the moment you wake we will be perfect and I wonder briefly if I can convince you to call in sick so I can bask in that stillness.) and I see you try to smile and thank you inwardly. You will never know that you couldn't fake happiness well enough not to hurt me with the amount of effort it takes, but maybe it's my fault for having so much practice.
You tell me I’m right (I’m not and you know that. I appreciate the sentiment.) and that you’ve been weighed down of late with some untreatable exhaustion (I know it is me but I am thoughtful enough not to make it about me because I know that that is a part of our problem. My ribs crack and make room for something that cannot live on its own.) and maybe a good long sleep will fix it (I know it won’t and I grant us the lie because that, too, is comforting in its solidity.).
We wrap ourselves up in one another and you give me the gift of ignorance (It hurts anyway because the thinking is infectious and I am not immune.) because you know it is my favorite.
Your hand breaks the second with a pause and I know I am not allowed to forget.
You say my name and I do not know what to say because my word means nothing. I don’t know what miracle would grant me peace and I don’t have the strength to keep you quiet.
You say we need to talk and I let you do it for me. I even hear you sometimes (I don’t want to I don’t want to I don’t want to.) over the sound of my own animal heart screeching in my ears and drowning out the thinking (I try so hard every single day to lighten your half of the load and it is never good enough. My back is breaking and you weep empty-handed.) and the forgetting (My crime has always been wanting and on the nights when I hate you all I want is to go back in time and tell you I’m not in this.) and the talking altogether, but never quite loud enough to make you flinch as much as I wish to God you would give me something real to work with.
And it takes some time, a few minutes of back and forth, but finally we start to get somewhere louder and more tangible in its cruelty, and by meeting me here I am convinced that at some point you may have cared for me. You might once have even loved me as much as you claimed (They told me you said it so fast before and I used to worry that I had made a fool of myself by saying it first. I still do. Maybe I was right.). When you call me a self-righteous bitch (I know and I am sorry, but more so that you hate who it is I’ve become.) I am all but certain that you are still the woman I chose to spend my life with, what little of it is left that will matter. When the light (It is a balm. It is mutually-assured destruction. It is all I have.) of that knowledge spreads through me like no silence could, I am filled with grateful solemnity and (Finally. Finally.) you put me in the ground.