It’s the way she’s looking at me now. Something about her eyes that I can’t really explain. I think I lack the words to explain. Not just me, actually, but the entire dictionary. Some other language out there probably has a term. Something that means what it should to explain what I see when she’s looking at me now. I notice the change in her eyebrows and life seems to suddenly amplify around me.
“Wait,” I yell over the din around me – it’s not really enough to cause a problem but I need an excuse so it’s what I use, “what did you say?”
“You weren’t listening.”
“I was listening but the…you know…” I motion my hands around at the unfortunate lack of chaos around me. “I just lost some of what you said.”
Her eyes tell me that she knows I’m lying but I also know that her eyes are telling me that they don’t care that I’m lying. It was the right kind of lie at the right kind of time at the right kind of place. I try not to think about the improbability of it all for obvious reasons.
Somehow, I verbally stumble my way through the evening and my growing intoxication has done the inconceivable and allowed me to remain functional enough to not do something so painfully strange that her eyes turn to daggers. Considering how things have been going recently, it’s hard not to be surprised by anything resembling a win.
The way her hair hangs as her inhibitions erode only makes her more beautiful. Maybe it’s just the friction of repetition. Maybe it’s just the honesty of reality pressing through the film of my existence. Maybe it’s everything else but that. It hurts all the same in the moment. It hurts in places I can’t even feel yet. Like a phantom pain of future pressure.
She sees that I’m staring again but this time I’m too drunk to care and, as I expected, so is she. It goes on for a while. Long enough that we should feel uncomfortable. Long enough that other people should feel uncomfortable for us. That long and longer. That long and longer still.
I blink first but not because I have to.
“Drink!” she says as the flat of her hand strikes the table like an axe splitting an oak.
Even with the room reverberating around me, I find the ability to meddle with my phone and there’s never a new tab or a new window without the application doing everything possible to shove itself down your throat. Annoyed, I swipe and – as I do – some semblance of post-visual assessment clicks and makes me go back.
You know those moments where you’re doing something and your eyes and your brain suddenly goes, “Mongoose” and you’re like, “Wait…what? Did I see the word mongoose?” and then you look around and you feel certain you’ve lost it and then – after you’re just about to give up but you didn’t – you see it. There – not cleanly. Not clearly. But it’s there. Mongoose. Your eyes had grabbed it and kept it and your brain lost its proverbial shit trying to understand why. Yeah. That.
Because technology is perfect and never does anything wrong ever, it takes me longer than it should to accidentally my way back to the moment that I’m starting to doubt was even real. When I find it, I stop.
I scroll and I scroll. I scroll. I scroll back to the top. I stare at the pictures and the words.
There’s a tightness in my chest and I’m panicking. I’m sick in a way that I never thought I could be. This wasn’t how anything was supposed to go. Her face is resting there in two dimensions. Inaccurate, to say the least. Clearly a picture from long before last night given the differences in hair. The words of the presiding officer are at the bottom of the article: “Whatever befell Melissa Vivian Andrews was not accidental. It was not a momentary lapse of judgment. We will do everything in our power to find the one who murdered Misses Andrews and we will see justice served to its fullest extent.”
I feel deflated. Empty. Dying. Dead. I want to vomit. I can feel my organs pressing inside like too much food. I want my liver and kidneys to pour out of my mouth like an embryonic sac of kittens on their way to a shallow river in a bag of too-thick plastic.
Science tells us that there’s a reality where she never died. Religion tells us that there’s a realm that she now exists in which is free from pain.
Times like this, I wish I believed in more than probabilities and facts. I wonder how I could have done things differently. Done them better. Done them right. What could I have said? Where could we have gone?
Her eyes seem like a phantom outline of existence when I close my eyes. Haunting me with their beauty. Their hope. Their life. Their demise.
Have you ever felt an ache that didn’t live where it hurt? An itch that didn’t go away until you scratched where you didn’t itch? A point of pain that you couldn’t be rid of until you pressed a point on your body that was entirely apart from where you hurt?
If ever I thought a heart could hurt in a most surreal way, this would be that time.
I don’t know that the world could be darker than it is at this moment.
I listen to the static of the world around me as the clock seems to mock me. The world beyond is an interwoven fabric of white noise and vacuity. I try to focus. I try to think. I try to understand how things could have gone so wrong. How the very heart in my chest could rise so ceremoniously before meeting the piercing strike of misfortune. Here where all understanding is thrown into the realms of circumspect.
I try to breath as I do. I try to remember a time before a time before a time.
I place my hand upon my chest and I count. I let the words fade into phantoms and then I count some more. I let the time turn into timber and then I try to think on the theory of their ethereal thoughts. I let the shores of sentience shift to static. It tastes like loquats.
I can hear her in the void. Her cadence calls to me as surely as a klaxon.
I open my eyes and she sits across from me. Her smile draws me in. Her eyes are enigmatic and so full of light. So full of light. So full of love. So full of everything I wish I had. Everything I wish I were. Everything. Everything and everything and everything to the power of itself. I know I’m blushing and I don’t care. I don’t care. I’m so happy to be here now. To be in this moment.
Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Forever. Forever, if I have to.
I try to pay attention to everything as she speaks, same as I’ve done so many times. So many times before. I try to listen to the sound behind the sound behind the words. I try to listen to everything and everything else and everything more and I can’t hear her sometimes. It feels like a dagger in my heart. I let my hand rest upon hers. I want to touch her hand one more time. Just once. Just now. When I do, she pauses for a moment and she looks at my fingers curled around her wrist and then she talks as though I’m but a comma in the sentence of her life.
I wish I could take a picture of her now. Her glow. Her existence. Her magnificence. Her beauty. I kiss her when her words fall away. I let my lips linger longer than I should and I tell her that I love her. Because I love her. I love. Her. Her. I love her. I love her so much. So much.
So much.
I can feel my heart swelling. It fits like a balloon at the base of my esophagus. It hangs over my head like my inability to tell her how much I love her, even now. How much I always loved her. How much I could. Even then.
Who are the waiters? Who are the cooks? Who looks at us? Who doesn’t?
My focus feels drawn and quartered. That and then ten times again.
It hurts when I have to spend this time thinking about everything else but her. The symphony of life falters in those moments. It tangles around itself like a set of Christmas lights that were put away too quickly and without care. A strand of errant hopes whose only dream was to come to life someday. A strand of broken failures due to even one moment out of place. Something about that thought rests heavily upon my chest. My stomach. My nerves. My very existence.
It feels like an itch. Like a tickle at my wrist. When I look, my watch is shivering. The world around me is vibrating.
I follow her home as I’ve done so many times before. Watchful. Every car. Every street. Every person walking. I’ve seen this all so many times before and yet somehow I don’t understand where I’ve gone wrong. Where everything went so wrong.
I stand for hours. Hours and hours. The moon is high in the sky and the city is silent around me. I slip through the shadows and I enter the building across the street. I move quietly up the stairs. I wait for a while in a corner, my eyes upon her door. Someone must arrive at some point between now and then. There’s no other explanation. No other way. How could there be?
I wait for a while longer and the world is silent around me. The time is as the time requires and so I stand as the time requires. My steps are cotton on a landscape of polyester.
With little more than the sound of a matchstick breaking, I enter her room. Silent there as well. No lights. No movement. No urgency. No voyeur. Nothing but darkness and time and the face of an angel.
I place the pillow over her face and my legs are around her arms so she can’t move. She tries to, of course. She moves as much as she can and I whisper, “I love you” into the air like a misting of perfume. Like a small glance of beauty in a world that misses it so very, very much.
When she stops moving I kiss her neck. Even beneath the rubber cement upon my lips, I can taste her. I can smell her beyond the cotton stoppers in my nostrils. I hold back my tears as I come to terms with her passing. I can hear my mind telling me that this is love. This is love. This is love. Because love hurts and nothing hurts more than this. And nothing hurts more than me.
It’s a quiet death. A clean death. I can discard my gloves as I leave.
This time, I leave them in a dumpster off of Serf and Terrace as I’m still mostly certain that the gloves are not my failing.
I have a hard time sleeping as I often do these days. I’m staring at the clock as it passes two in the morning and I want more than anything to wake up and for it not to be yesterday.
I say out loud – if only quietly – “Just let it be tomorrow.”
When I dream, she’s smiling at me. She’s smiling and I hope she’ll never stop. I place my hand upon her chin and I don’t know why she isn’t smiling anymore.
I feel my heart dying.
She asks me if we can do this again tomorrow and her eyes don’t seem to say the same. My eyes express my pain and yet I wonder if she can see it. I know I need to follow her. I need to know why.
If it doesn’t work, I can always try again…
…tomorrow…
Inspired by the prompt by Afterwards: All the time in the world
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The Pegasus Fiasco 
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