She sleeps behind a stone door, locked, numbered with his initials. And, even though I packed her away in a tidy grave, she tries to claw her way to the surface making a mess out of everything, especially when he needs her. I can’t deny it. She was the best part of me though she had a mind for crying and thought about death more often than not. (She got what she wanted and now she wants my body back.) She was young and innocent, quiet, afraid. She thought that once she found a love for her broken body that that was gonna make the world spin in a better, beautiful way. She—she loved. She could say it, too.
I know that the world thinks I’m faking. That it’s all a façade. That I am still her. But, I’m not. I’m only her with him. He just has this way with me. And, it brings her back from the crypt. It’s like, it’s like when we speak, hearing those calming bells and it elevates. That is when she digs. It’s gorgeous, so beautiful. Yet, it’s the most frightening feeling I’ve known, thus far.
Technically, he wasn’t her first love. But, dare I say it now, he was the love of her life. (That’s something that won’t ever die, I’m afraid.) It’s complicated because they were never more than friends, but then again, they were more than words could ever describe. That was what was so special about it—having the love of your life being that, something you never really had.
He loved her. He loved her. He was there for her in some of her darkest moments. He helped her when he wasn’t even aware. He loved her exactly the way she needed to be loved. He wouldn’t hurt her. He didn’t hurt her once. He didn’t hurt her. He wouldn’t hurt her.
Not in a thousand, million years, he wouldn’t hurt her even if he could.
She waited for him for all of those, too. She waited for him to tell her he loved her. And, she thought he did in little ways. She thought that one day, it’d happen. She imagined how happy he’d make her as they lied in the grass, looking up at our home. He’d make her laugh and she’d kiss him. She wouldn’t even have to say it, but she would.
Just when she thought it could be, he left her hanging by a noose with a weight of an ugly world upon her shoulders. Doubt spun her ‘round with the earth as she sang those old songs, waiting on a painless go.
He didn’t save her. Not this time. Maybe, he was saving someone else, saving himself.
Maybe she had it all wrong.
You know, the funny thing of it is that when we need something to be so true we hear what we want to hear in those lyrics. Sometimes, we sing the right words at the wrong time or the wrong ones with the perfect timing.
Some of her favorite lines of her favorite songs were the ones she made up. They were the ones she heard wrong.
A lot has happened since then. A lot’s changed. Almost everything, everything except the love for him. That is the only piece that remains of her. That’s how you know you love someone right. It never dies.
I often talk to him as if he is a ghost, shoveling dirt upon her home to the beat:
I am, now, whom I wished I was then, with a love for myself. I am, now, whom I wished I was then, with a hunger for making a mess of anyone who tries to make a mess of me.
I wonder if he can hear me, now. I wonder if he can love me, now.
I wonder if he can hear me through the door, locked.
