The Aftermath of Forever

Some things that I have learned: They say time heals everything, and it does, but it doesn’t erase all traces of the past, the scars like white rope across the heart. Sometimes I go back to the house where I spent my days with her, starry-eyed and with my heart pinned to my sleeve, throbbing with hope for a future that to my eyes looked so bright.

I walk up the creaking wooden stairs now, my socked feet slipping on the polished wood and I crest the stairwell, and there’s the table where we once sat and worked physics problems together after school. There is where I laid my head with a sigh of defeat and where she bent to press kisses to my hair and where I reached up and caught her around the neck, pulling her down to me.

I walk into her bedroom and my heart goes numb because these wounds, they’re healed, but I can still remember the phantom marks of her knife so clearly that I look down to make sure my shirt is not bleeding through from the careful incisions across my heart.

I drop to my knees beside the one-thousand-piece puzzle we started the year it rained without end and which we swore that we would finish together that year. Now all the pieces lie shattered like glass across the table from where her younger cousins stumbled into it, and I want to laugh because you couldn’t have asked for a better sign than that. I tell her, “You need to get rid of this. It just makes me sad because we never finished it.” I say it lightly and she rolls her eyes at me because she sees a version of me that’s still whole and complete, just like she looks at that puzzle and sees the same thing.

She walks into the adjacent bathroom to finish putting on her makeup and I wander into the inner room where she sleeps. My heart echoes with phantom emotion, phantom desires and dreams that I have locked up deep inside it. I sit down on the bed and I think, this is where she pushed me down and curled around me and held me close, like she drank her life’s spirit from me, and maybe she did and that’s why I’m so empty now. I stare disdainfully down at the two ghosts lying intertwined, still whispering their secrets and their promises to each other in the early hours of the morning.

She emerges from the bathroom and I jerk, looking up in time to see her tossing the old too-big sweatshirt of hers that I used to sleep in into the closet.

Across the bed from me, my ghost sits up, her longer hair falling in tangles down her back, her eyes soft and vulnerable. My heart aches for her. Don’t do it, I think to her, but I know it’s useless. Even now, knowing all of the consequences, I’d still do it all over again.

The house is loud with a party, the noises of people talking and glasses clinking and laughter all filter in through the open doorway. I stand alone just inside her room, peering at the string of polaroid pictures she has draped above her dresser. On the bottom left corner, there is one dated March 12, or something close to it. I’ve tried to forget the exact date. I know that she was off by one day anyway when she dated it, so that helps. In it, she grins back at the camera, and I sit in the background in a too-big flannel, half-obscured, smiling demurely at the lens with light in my eyes.

I know that she never loved me because that picture is still there, hanging with the others. I always, every time, think of stealing it. Maybe I would burn it. Maybe I would put it in my shoebox of things that remind me of her and which still sits on the topmost shelf of my closet, as if that’s far enough away.

Sometimes I wonder if the world is tired of hearing my lament for her, and people tell me, “Haven’t you grieved long enough?” But I don’t decide when this pain should carve canyons out of my heart like black rivers. The flood comes in and I put that black pain down in black ink, the only way I can get it out of me.

There is not always a beautiful sunrise the morning after the storm. Sometimes, you wake up and you lean over and open the blinds and the rain is still coming down and the streets are flooding and the sky is moaning like she knows she’s lost something important, but she can’t remember what.

You clutched my glass heart in your fist until it shattered and then you dropped it so you wouldn’t have to feel the pain, and I was left clutching all of the pieces in my hands, scared to assess the damage even as the blood dripped in languid rivers between my shaking fingers.

It is hard to surrender to pain. I fight it, kicking and screaming, but it finally crawls into my bed and holds me like a lover, rocks me like the ghost of love. This is the only way to let the pain go. It opens its arms and takes it back into itself and when I open my eyes one morning, there are no more tears drying on my lashes.