Listen. I burned the scarf your mother gave me. Once you moved in across the street and started talking to me like you talk to everybody else, it seemed like the right thing to do. Your father was the one who told me it was hers; you couldn’t bear to bring her up at the time. Yes, I know she’s dead now. Call me crazy all the more you want. I’d only be lying if I said it didn’t hurt anymore.
Do you remember the night she died and how you couldn’t even cry? Simpler times. Compared to everything that came after, I mean. You wound yourself into my chest so tightly I felt your spine could’ve slipped through your skin. Hatred dripped from your snarled teeth. But then you asked me to shower with you. The water seemed like enough of a disguise, so you let yourself weep, thinking it would hide everything. But we all know the face of anguish. In my experience, it always arrives like an old friend, arms outstretched. Grief stays with you in that way. To give you privacy, I turned you around and washed your hair. I tried to draw out all the bad from your skull with my fingertips even though I knew it was a fruitless game. Pressed up against you, skin against skin, I felt your shoulders shaking. I feel them shaking now, even though you live across the street.
Then there was the night you proposed. Another planet of time, where you dropped to that knee and forgot all the words you had planned to say, and kept forgetting, until all you could stutter out was exactly that fact. It was all I needed to hear. Like taking someone’s breath away, you told me after, but I always thought it was more than that. You had given me all your words, too, your link from thoughts to the outside world, and that always felt like the most intimate act of all, some vow of unbreakable trust. I said yes right away. I said yes, yes, yes. I always said yes.
The root of denial was the beginning of the end. It was never an outward thing. It was the way your body once welcomed mine, then started feeling rote. When the glow of your smile could no longer light your eyes. This all sucks, doesn’t it? Being left behind. My life, by my own choosing, was something to plant in whatever ground you broke. At first I thought that was love. Then I figured it was sacrifice. Now I’m starting to think it’s loss.
So yeah, I burned the scarf. Maybe it wasn’t strong enough against the cold. Maybe it was threadbare. I’m sorry that we ruined all that used to make you warm.
Excavation || Emma-Lee M.