One year. It’s been one year.
That doesn’t feel real to write. It can’t possibly be true. How can it be one year since Charles was killed, when he died just yesterday? When he died last Tuesday and four weeks before that and two months ago and every day since that terrible notice arrived.
It can’t have been a year because the loss is as fresh as if I had been told moments ago.
Though, thinking of that day now—when I learned that he’d died and that I was listed as his next of kin in the same terrible moment…it hasn’t been a year, has it? It was January twenty-third that the telegram came. I lived in ignorance for thirteen days. There was a period of nearly two weeks in which the deed had been done, the shell had been dropped, and yet I knew nothing. He was still alive then. For thirteen days he was alive in my mind. Sometimes I wish it could have stayed that way, that they’d never alerted me and that the war had never ended, and I could exist in a perpetual state of hope he would return. What a rotten, selfish thought.
But have I not earned the right to be selfish? The universe has been unaccountably cruel to me, ensuring that his letter only arrived after—
It should have been a gift, that letter. I should have been able to hold onto it, to fill my head with the glimmering possibility of how we would greet each other in victory.
But instead I received a confession from a dead man. I don’t even have a body to bury, just a stray dog tag pulled from the wreckage in Belgium, and yet I have his final words. Words that should have signified the start of something, not the end.
What an awful trick he pulled on me. Watch The Great Chambers disappear. Glance over here at the promise of a spectacle, his affections laid bare, and by the time you look back over, he’ll have vanished. Except I experienced the illusion in reverse and misdirection is neither thrilling nor effective when you can see the strings of fate that are being used to hang a man.
I’m writing a lot of nonsense. I’ve been doing little else, this past year. Perhaps I need to go away, stop pretending like I’m any use to anyone. Perhaps I should go away for a long while.
After her husband died, I gave Mrs. Bowman—Virginia, I should say, we’re friends enough now—a sizable amount of money. Enough to take a year off. I wish I could say it was a purely generous gesture, but even at the time, I was so terrified of losing him and I couldn’t bear to look at her. She put on a brave face, far braver than I would have managed, but seeing her every day at her desk, continuing to do what began to feel like the utterly pointless work of our profession, while her one true love laid dead in a battlefield somewhere…it was too much of a reminder of what he was risking, being over there.
In any case, whatever the motivation, I was able to do her the kindness of giving her a year to grieve. No work, no concerns, just…time. To be honest, I could have probably given her several more years, but—and, again, I am ashamed of this—when she came back and found me as the broken man I am, I took solace in the horrific partnership we now share. She understands what I’ve been through, more than anyone in my life, and was plenty aware of my…varied affairs, to put it one way, to blink an eye at my becoming a widower to another man.
Though, no, that isn’t quite right. That implies there was once a time in which I could claim the privilege of being something more to Charles than a bosom friend. Would that make all of this better or worse? Would his absence be easier to bear if I could recall those close and happy times in the way that Virginia reminisces about her honeymoon? She was—is—understandably overwrought with her loss, but whenever she speaks of Roger, it is with such fondness. She loves him so deeply, remembers him with such warmth, and meanwhile I am sometimes so furious with Charles that I can’t even see straight.
But I miss him. That’s the worst part. I’m so goddamn angry, I’m bitter, I’m buried underneath the oppressive sadness of grief, but mostly I just miss him.
I miss his laugh, which I’d gotten good at pulling out of him. I miss the way he was so particular about things, how he almost never let me win an argument, even if I could tell he knew I was right and was simply debating me for the sport of it. I miss how gentle his voice could be.
I miss his hands. Strong and littered with scars, all the more beautiful for the stories behind them. I don’t have any photos that do them justice. Not that any photograph could do any part of him justice. I suppose I should just be grateful I have a decent collection.
I wish I’d gotten him on film, properly. Not just the test reels he’d tolerate when I bought myself whatever new camera came onto the market.
There’s one in particular I took that captures him in the act of smiling. Not just any smile either, but the special one he has had when he was trying not to smile at me but couldn’t help it. I’d brought my camera to DC and made him stand in front of a cherry blossom tree. He was so bashful at the time, trying to get out of being my subject, but he looks so pleased in the footage. He looks like a film star. Handsome and charming and alive.
Thank goodness I went into the movie business. I can’t imagine I’d have even that if I hadn't. But I do need to be careful with the film. I worry about wearing it out. For as long as I can watch him flicker into motion, brought into shape by light and movement, I can keep him alive.
Good lord, Virginia is right. I’ve become so terribly maudlin of late. Perhaps it really is time for me to pull up stakes and wander the world for a while. God knows I don’t have anything keeping me here. Just a wonderful friend going through her own process of mourning, a beautiful house I can’t stand to be in, and a thriving movie studio that brings me absolutely no pleasure.
And I have years and years ahead of me. Endless decades of my perpetual life without him in it. He told me he’d never be lonely as long as I walked this earth and I didn’t say a word. I didn’t tell him that it was the same for me. I didn’t make him promise that he’d never leave me in a world without him.
There is so much I didn’t say. I’ve spent the last year reflecting on all the conversations we never had and I would do anything—would perform any kind of black magic—to speak to him again.
I would trade it if I could. I would trade the immortal nature of my life to live an ordinary one in a world that still houses his soul.
I’ve survived near-death at the hands of my own illusion, war, fire, a sinking ship—so much that should have killed me. At times I’ve even looked forward to discovering what else I am capable of surviving.
But how on earth am I meant to survive this?
[from the personal diary of J.S. Fogg]
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