Lilacs

“I love you.”

That’s what I would have liked to hear.

Those three words.

I had uttered the words to her so many times. So many times.

I.

Love.

You.

I meant them every time I said them.

And God, for so long, I just wanted to hear her say them to me.

She loved me, she made a point of showing that to me. She would shower me in acts of love, in long kisses after work and soft singing hums late at night when I couldn’t sleep. She didn’t need to say the words aloud for me to know them. Still, I would have liked to have heard them in some way, in her voice like birdsong.

But she was scared. Scared of what people would think. I’ve always thought that she believed that if she said the words aloud, it would all be released and the entire world would know. It sounds paranoid, but she had reasons. Her family had been staunch Catholics for generations, and to be honest, I didn’t blame them for their disdain. They had been brought up in those beliefs for centuries. Centuries of learning takes a long time to go away. So I understood why she was nervous. And so, I waited. I waited for her to say the words to me as time passed, as we spent late nights together, kissing, happy, free.

We could be free together in the safety of the night. When the shadows of the world mask faces, when all shapes morph together into collective groups, neglecting color and backgrounds.

I can’t lie, I had noticed she was becoming shyer around me. How she would nervously hold my hand, even at night. How she sometimes wouldn’t look at me when I held her in my arms as we watched the evening news. Some optimistic part of me hoped that this change was somehow good, that it meant that what we were doing was becoming more normal. I then remembered: Christmas.

The holiday was approaching rapidly. On Christmas, she would always go to visit her family. I hoped that she was planning to tell her family about us, and I told myself that was the reason she was nervous. I knew it would hurt her. But I had constantly told her that when it hurt, I would be there for her, always. I would hold her as long as she needed.

We wanted to get married someday. Hopefully, someday soon.

While she was packing for go home for Christmas, I came home from work to see a handful of lilacs on the kitchen table. They were a deep shade of purple and smelt of beauty and love. That was all the confirmation I needed. I went to the bedroom, where she was folding a blouse, and I hugged her from behind before pressing a soft kiss to the back of her neck, silently telling her that I understood what she was going to do. When we walked together to the door, she gripped my hand in hers. And then, when she walked out the door, she kissed me deeply.

“I love you,” I told her.

She smiled back at me, and in my head I could actually hear her voice saying the three words to me.

She stayed with her family for a week. I didn’t mind spending the holiday by myself. I had done it before.

She was supposed to come back home during the day on Monday, when I would be at work. I had missed her in the few days that she had been gone. I missed her presence next to me. I missed her light breathing while she was sleeping. I missed waking up to the sounds of her wandering around the kitchen, preparing tea. I liked my tea warm, she preferred hers cold. Because of this disparity, she would get up much earlier than I to brew some English Breakfast and put her half in the fridge while keeping my half on the stove. I missed her, but I kept myself company with the vase full of the lilacs she had put on the table, the crystal glass scintillating in the filtered sunlight as it sat on a windowsill in the kitchen.

She hadn't called me while she had been gone, but that didn’t surprise me, her family had surely kept her busy. I was looking forward to getting home at the end of the day so I could finally see her, hear her.

Imagine my surprise when my phone began buzzing on my office desk, the screen lighting up with the familiar “<3” of her contact. I answered quickly and held the phone up to my ear.

“Hey, baby,” I said.

God, if I had known what I was going to hear on the other end of that line.

If I had known, I wouldn’t have gone to work that day. I would have stayed at home, waiting for her.

I should have known.

“Esme,” she whispered my name, and I could hear her heavy breathing. My blood ran cold immediately. “Esme, please.” She sounded like she was crying. And judging by the surrounding noises, she was somewhere loud. Windy.

At this point, I had already grabbed my jacket from my chair and was running to the exit, my heeled shoes echoing off the walls. “Baby, what’s wrong?” I asked frantically. My heart was pounding in my chest. She wasn’t one to get upset easily. I might be one who would burst into tears at a simple broken teacup, but not her. She was built to be strong.

“My family…” she said with a gasp. “I told my family, Esme.”

“Where are you?” I asked frantically, now outside the building and running to my car.

“I told my family, and they hate me now,” she continued as if I hadn’t spoken. My heart broke as I listened to her cry. I jumped into my car and turned on the ignition, deciding to go back to our apartment. That’s where she would have gone, right? Home? Her real home? After all, home was were people that loved you were, right?

“Baby, calm down,” I told her, trying to keep my shaking voice steady as I began to drive. “Just take a deep breath and talk to me.”

In that moment, some part of me knew that something bad was going to happen. Buy me some time, I begged the Lord. Just get her to talk to me, until I can be there with her. I wish that I had known that just minutes sooner.

“I… I can’t,” she sobbed out. “Oh God, Esme, the looks on their faces… they were disgusted. Horrified.”

Please, God, I begged.

“Esme,” she cried out my name like it was the last thing in the world keeping her sane. “Esme, I can’t do this anymore.”

Tears blurred my vision as some invisible knife lodged itself in my heart. “No, no,” I chanted in a thick voice. “No, you can’t leave me…” I started crying loudly, which I could tell only increased her own crying. “I love you!” I practically screamed out those three holy words, the words that could change the fate of everyone that heard them.

The cacophony of noises on the other end of the line increased. “I love you, too,” she whispered back. “So much.” She laughed a breathy chuckle. “I would never try to leave you, Esme. I just can’t take this anymore. I need it to end.”

“What are you saying?!” I howled the words as my car swerved in and out of traffic, the speed far above the posted limit in my desperate need to get to her.

“I’ll be going,” she said. “Take good care of yourself.”

The call ended.

I screamed.

What felt like an eternity later, I arrived at the apartment building. I don’t think I really parked, I think I just stopped the car before cutting the engine and jumping out.

I saw a crowd gathered near the main entrance. Uncaring what the commotion was about in my desperate need to get to her, I burst through the crowd, trying to get to the doors.

And then I saw it.

In some vague memory, I remember hearing screaming. Horrific, tear-your-ears out screaming that ripped my heart open. Screaming like the world was collapsing in on itself.

People have told me that it was me who was screaming.

I don’t remember doing it, but the possibility doesn’t surprise me.

Because "I'll be going, take good care of yourself," those were the last words she had said to me or to anyone else, because in that moment, I saw her beautiful body on top of a wrecked car, bleeding after jumping off the apartment building roof. Her eyes were open, and the look in those lifeless eyes was one full of pain and misery.

I have been told I screamed again as I ran to her. I jumped onto the indented car and cradled her still-warm body in my arms. Her blood was covering me, staining my blouse and skirt, and all I could think of was that the love of my life was dead. I kissed her soft lips, smearing the two different shades of our lipsticks together. I sobbed. I screamed. I buried my face in her hair, our shared shampoo scented like lilacs filling my senses. She used that shampoo because she knew I loved the scent, even though it was meant for long hair, like mine, not cropped, like hers.

As memories of her lightly pulling on my hair as we laid in bed together, of the vase of purple lilacs above us, of her smile as she left all flashed before my eyes, I kissed her unresponsive lips again. The kiss became more sloppy each passing second as I lost breath to gasping sobs and screams. I didn’t care what people thought of us. I didn’t care what names they were thinking of. It was, after all, their fault. Their societal judgments had killed her.

Their judgments of people who were in just one small way different than them had killed the true love of my life.

They took her broken body from my arms minutes later, and I had just enough time to gently close her eyes with my hand. She had been blessed with the most beautiful eyes I had ever seen. Those people didn’t deserve to see the beautiful orbs that had so captivated me.

Bearly-eyed, I looked around at the faces of the surrounding crowd and I observed the mixture of expressions on their faces. There were some looks of sympathy, some of disgust, and others of contempt. As I looked at the faces, I understood what she had meant. She wanted it to end, and so she ended it.

As darkness began filling my vision and I began to lose my feeble grip on reality, I realized: she had said “I love you.”

Author’s Note: Lilacs are said to be the flower language for lesbian couples.