Have you ever lost someone?
Chances are you have. So, chances are you’ll understand what I’m about to say.
When you lose someone, when someone dies, there’s this sort of absence that comes with it. I know that sounds obvious, but the absence I’m talking about is so much an absence, so nothing, that it’s almost something. It’s a hole in… in everything. It’s everywhere you look, because no matter where you look, that person, that someone, isn’t there. It’s a gap, a tear in your reality, and it’s got ragged, jagged, ugly edges that cut and make you bleed.
There are things people say when they feel the absence for the first time. Sometimes, maybe even most times, the things they say are laced with regret of some kind. Wishes for one more day, for one more talk, for one more I love you, or a final goodbye. The sentiment behind most of these things, behind the regret, remorse, and sorrow, is something like “I wish I hadn’t taken them for granted”.
You wish that, when that person was living, you had acted differently. Realized what a gift they were, and told them so. Spent more time, more money, more… just more. To savor and cherish each minute like it might be the last…
I’m telling you, right now, that’s bullshit.
The ability to take someone for granted, to know that, when the sun comes up tomorrow, they’ll be around – and the next day, and the next, and the next after that. That assurance, that confidence, is a blessing.
When my wife was killed, and the tear of her absence cut and stabbed and tore at me, I would have given anything, everything, to be able to take her for granted again. To know that I would see her when I came home. To make plans a week ahead of time. To know she loved me, and know she knew I loved her. I ached for the chance to take her for granted again.
I tell you this, not to justify what I’ve done, but to show you that what I did wasn’t irrational, or without reason. I didn’t go crazy. I’m not crazy now. I was only…
Well, I’m not really sure. Grieving, we’ll call it.
It started small. So small, it was almost an accident.
My wife and I had our own sort of daily rituals. Habits. Married people shit. Things like, when we woke up, she would make the bed and I’d make us breakfast – two pieces of toast, hers with jam mine with peanut butter. She didn’t like the crust – I used to tease her about that – so I would cut her crust off and put it on my plate. Waste not want not.
One morning, a few weeks after her funeral, when I was trying to put what was left of my life into some sort of order, I made myself breakfast. Two pieces of toast. One jam, one peanut butter, crust for both on my plate. I put both of them on the table before I realized what I’d done. Once I saw that I’d made our breakfast, her breakfast, I don’t mind telling you, I lost it. It was like she’d died all over again. I cried for hours.
It was the little things like that that would catch me off guard, knock the breath out of me, and send me to my knees bawling my eyes out. Grief is a hell of a thing.
Each time I slipped up, went on auto-pilot, and just mindlessly did one of our routines, I would feel her absence just over my shoulder, its jagged edges clawing into me. The pain was like nothing I’d ever felt before. I missed her so badly, it physically hurt.
Here’s where things get a little… well, here’s the reason I’m here, writing this.
After a while, and don’t ask me to explain it, I started doing our routines on purpose. The effort of stopping felt like too much. It was easier to just keep doing them. Don’t get me wrong, it still hurt like Hell, but the pain was almost soothing; it was like the pain of her absence was the closest I could get to feeling her, and if I couldn’t have her, then at least I could still have that.
So, I made the toast with jam, no crust. I did the dishes when it was my day, watched our shows when they came on, cooked dinner when it was my turn to cook, and when it was hers, I just didn’t eat. I kept our bedtime, kept her car in her spot in the garage, Hell, I even kept buying her favorite snacks from the store even though I never ate them. And life just sort of… kept going. If a stranger walked into my house during that time, they would’ve had no reason to believe that two people didn’t live there. Everything we did together, I did on my own.
Don’t ask me for how long this went on, I genuinely don’t know. Time lost all meaning after she died, and days, weeks, and months could have been eons or minutes. What I do know, is that sometime in the early Autumn, things changed. I had just finished breakfast and had gone back upstairs to brush my teeth (making sure to wash the toothpaste completely off the sink, the wife hated residue) when I passed by our bedroom.
The bed, which I hadn’t bothered to make since she’d passed, was perfectly made. Duvet stretched, corners tucked, throw blanket folded at the foot.
I don’t really know how to describe what I felt. I’d been numb for so long, my emotions had atrophied like unused muscles. I stared at the bed for a long time. In movies, when something like this happens, the characters in the story start trying to think of rational explanations. Maybe I did it without realizing, or I had a mental break or some sort of bizarre home intruder. These ideas skittered across my mind, here and gone without my really considering them.
Instead, I just spoke out loud – the first time I’d done so in that house since she died. My voice was rough from disuse, and sort of rasped into the room. “Thanks, honey.”
Then I grabbed my coat and went to work.
From that point on, things started to happen more regularly. It wasn’t every day, but it wasn’t rare either. I’d find my shoes organized by the door, just the way she used to do, I’d find dishes cleaned on her days, the television would turn itself on when it was time for our shows, and, of course, the bed would be made after breakfast. Each time I would discover something like this, I would thank my wife and keep on with my routine.
You might think that these acts brought me some sort of comfort, or piece of mind, or closure. They didn’t. Rather, these actions only served to amplify her absence. Each sign of her, every indication of her presence, only emphasized that she wasn’t there, and served as constant reminders of all that I’d lost.
Her absence, that tear in my reality, grew daily. It wasn’t long before it consumed the house. And I lived next to it, constantly hounded by it as it yawned around me. The pain it caused was my only companion, and I cherished it, pressed into it, impaling myself on those ragged edges like an offering.
And the absence accepted my gift.
It took everything I had to offer, hollowing me out in return for the pain. I could feel myself starting to fade. Like all the color was going out of me. Bleeding away.
And so, I existed. Living but not really alive, mechanically going about my routines, our routines, like a thing made of gears and springs rather than flesh and blood. The absence of my wife making itself known in everything I did. I drifted in this malaise for who knows how long, uninterrupted and slowly, slowly wasting away.
Then, three nights ago, I saw it.
It was during the earliest hours of the morning. I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling thoughtlessly, unable to rest, when I felt the mattress next to me move as though someone was stirring in their sleep. I turned my head to look, and I saw her.
People are defined according to what and who they are. We are, for all intents and purposes, positive beings in the mathematical sense. We take up space in the world, and by virtue of existing, we add to it.
The woman in my bed that night was not such a thing. Because she wasn’t really a thing at all.
She had my wife’s face and features, her lovely smile, and her soft lips. She had my wife’s body, her gentle hands, and curved shoulders. She had my wife’s scar on her arm from when she was a child, her dimple on her right cheek. But she was not my wife.
Darkness gets its definition from an absence of light. Cold, from its absence of heat. A hole from its absence of substance. This thing was like that. Defined by what it wasn’t. Defined by its lack of some central quality. What was lying next to me, whatever else it might have been, was not my wife.
“Dearest,” my tormentor whispered.
“Yes?” I said. Whatever emotions are required for surprise had long worn away.
“We’re nearly done,” she said, her voice so utterly not my wife’s. “It’s nearly over.”
I nodded. “Will I see her again? The real her?”
The woman smiled sweetly, sadly. “Three days.”
She touched my cheek with a hand so cold it burned. I closed my eyes and leaned into the pain.
“But first,” she said. “A gift.”
She kissed me. Her lips seared my own with their coldness, but I did not pull away.
And then she was gone.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I started to feel the gift she had granted me. It started low, deep down in my gut. It had been so long since I’d felt anything, I could not correctly identify it.
By the second day, the feeling had grown in intensity. It coiled around my spine and crept up my neck to the base of my skull. It sent shivers down my body and set my teeth on edge.
Today, the feeling ravages me. As I type this in the darkness of my room, my hands shake from its intensity. The first emotion that I’ve truly had since the death of my wife. Full, and mature and exquisite in its appropriateness. I feel it now, more than ever as I catch sight of her just to my right, lingering on the edges of the light cast by my monitor. I see her teeth, no longer bothering to mimic my wife’s. I see the hunger glinting in her eyes. And I savor her gift, the gift of feeling, of being alive just one more time, however briefly. The feeling that I ought to have felt long ago, but didn’t. Fear.