literature

Humans

Deviation Actions

Published: Mar 22, 2013

330 Views

Literature Text

She likes to think she could bury him. She likes to imagine a place she can visit and know he is near, even if it’s only skin and bones. At least he’d be near. But, she imagines him lying in a field somewhere in France, his beautiful skin ravaged by different carrion. She imagines him alone and it kills her more than the telegraph did.

How out of place that telegraph had seemed. It came on a perfectly ordinary Wednesday morning. Shouldn’t the world have ended the moment he stopped breathing? Shouldn’t she have known? Why had she needed a telegraph to tell her the news, when she should have felt it?

Her mother, a self-proclaimed expert in all matters of the heart, tells her she’s in denial and that’s why she hasn’t cried yet.

She isn’t, though. She knows exactly what had happened. She isn’t expecting him to come home, to start breathing again. But, she can’t understand why she hadn’t gone when he did. It’s not that she wants to die, it’s that she can’t imagine life without him. She can’t imagine not hearing his voice or listening to his heartbeat. She can’t imagine being someone that lives without him. For twenty years, she’s seen his face and heard his laugh and held him. He knows (knew; he knew) her better than she knows herself. If he’s gone, how is she supposed to know anything?

Her knowledge of the way the world works depends entirely on his presence; her own spatial recognition relies on his gravity. She always figured her life out in correlation to how her events would match to his. It’s not that she can’t decide her own destiny, it’s that she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want a future that exists without him.

She hasn’t cried because she knows that everything has changed. She knows she can’t pretend, she can’t deny the fact that he’s gone. She wishes she could. She wants to cry and scream; she wants to smash every picture of them against the wall and watch as the pieces of glass settle on the floor in chaotic patterns. She wants to erase every memory, wipe his scent out of her clothes, rip his touch from her skin. Because then she wouldn’t know. She would never have loved him, and never have lost him.

Because then she wouldn’t have to accept the fact that her world has completely broken. She could maintain some control over the elements of her life and blissfully believe the world works the way she wishes it would.