Carry On Regardless

fiftytwostories:

We were young. We existed back when people still called her Marlo, back before our hearts started running parallel and before our weaving lives separated.

I was awkward and blunt. I was too skinny and too pale and too lacking. My crooked teeth held evidence of my last meal and my virgin hair had never met with a comb. I was always trying to cover insecurities with improper remarks and haughty laughter, but despite all of my flaws and inexperience, Marlo, who could wear skinny and pale better than I ever could, loved me. She was everything endearingly destructive and more.

When things got quiet, she would talk about the adventures waiting for her outside of our small town, outside of our narrow hearts and our restricted arms. I never saw what there was to escape from, but she would describe the chains around her ankles and her wrists and I would try to crush them with kisses.

She appeared smaller as days went by, trapped inside her own life. I loved her and I found my home in her, but she didn’t believe in homes.

It was the look in her eyes the day before she left – abandonment, resignation, and assumption all clouded into a pair of hazels. I used to get lost in them. I used to spend hours just looking and digging and I would see both my future and my demise.

I was ruined the first day she went missing. I sank into the emptiness of the hour and into the echo of my pleadings while her absence awakened my surroundings. The floors creaked, the pipes bellowed, the walls sighed. The house could feel the void just as much as I could.

The years went on regardless of my world’s deficiencies. Life was forced upon me in the wake of my tragedy and I thought of her.

I thought of her when I had my first drink. It was beer and it was disgusting and she would’ve been proud. For a while, I spent the better half of my days drinking in a desperate attempt to stay connected to her.

I thought of her as my list of girlfriends expanded. They could never compare to her arms or her legs or her voice or her anything. And when they were kissing me, I was kissing her.

I thought of her dark hair, my favourite part of her, and it seemed so awful that the thing I loved about her the most was just dead matter.

I thought of her all the time. She was the shadow cast over every moment of my life, before cooking a meal, after rejecting a woman, before and after each haircut. Would she have liked this? Would she have been impressed? Would this have made her stay?

Some days, I woke up, called in sick, and pretended she had never left.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“Here, you can pick the channel.”

“Stop nagging.”

“No, you don’t look fat.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“I love you. I love you. I love you.”

“Hi.”

Sometimes, I laid in bed and painted her body next to mine with my eyes. I tried to squeeze her out of my heartbreak, but she remained present. It was the only place she could never run from. It was the home she never believed in.

The night before she vanished, she had asked me to braid her hair. She didn’t want to feel the wind flowing through it if and when she decided to run. She didn’t want to feel free. She just wanted the truth. And so, naively thinking that she would still be there when I woke up, I crisscrossed the locks while she told me about Europe and the ocean and the desert and how ants sometimes helped butterflies.

She was already miles away as I sat there listening and I found myself wondering how something so entirely dead could be so entirely lovely at the very same time.

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