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Who is this girl? After your death, and after five years of what I would consider a pretty goddamn good marriage, I found myself asking that very same question all over again.
It doesn’t occur to most people when you meet the person with whom you wish to spend the rest of your life that, at some point, one of you will leave.
Over the past month or so you had grown distant toward me, had begun to close in on yourself. My attempts at drawing whatever it was out of you had been met with denial—everything was fine, you were just under a lot of stress at work, this too shall pass. But I knew better. I knew you better.
Some may say that our destinies are etched in stone from the moment of our births, but I don’t believe that. I think that life is what you make of it and the choices are yours. Free will asserts that we all must live with the consequences of our actions…
I watched all of these simple contrivances—things I had observed you to do innumerable times before—without so much as an inkling that all the while, that great and terrible cosmic clock was winding down, tick, tick, tick, mercilessly close to coming to a full stop on our time together in this life.
Ignorant to the fact that, by this time, the trajectory of my life had already been wholly and irrevocably altered, I went downstairs, clicked on the television, then poured myself a large mug of coffee in the kitchen.
When someone dies of natural causes, the mourning can be a private affair. When they die the way you did, Allison, we’re forced to share our grief publicly, at least for a little while. For days after the shooting, I couldn’t turn on the news without hearing your name, seeing your face, listening to recounts of what transpired in that little boutique.
I was losing my mind without you, Allison. Because that’s what grief does. It robs us of a part of ourselves, leaving a crater of madness and irrationality in its place.
My mind was a never-ending loop of alternate possibilities, of planes of existence where I had gone with you and you had survived, those other versions of us still living happily in the blissful ignorance of my grief.
And as bad as these nightmares were, it was worse to awaken and realize you were gone in real life.
“I just want to make sure you do things. And don’t just stay bottled up in this house. At least go for a walk around the neighborhood or something. Get some sun on your face. Anything, Aaron. Keep active. Grief hates a moving target.”
I was retreating into the gray again, curling myself into a fetal ball and preparing to disassociate. All of a sudden I wanted nothing more than to be back home.
People put locks on things when they want to keep them safe. People put locks on things when they don’t want other people to see what they’re hiding inside.
This was how our cruelly brief marriage had been for me: a dome beneath which we were fully immersed in each other and the rest of the world be damned. Everything we did—every dream and idea and epiphany we ever had—we shared with each other. This was my understanding, anyway. I had thought you’d felt the same way. I would have bet on it.
It caused a throbbing bolt of anger to temporarily replace my grief. I welcomed it, because since your death, I’d felt as if I’d died, too, and it was becoming a permanent state for me. Yet anger makes us feel alive. So I let it fuel me for as long as it would, which turned out not to be very long at all. Because when I stepped into our townhome that night, I broke down all over again.
“We haunt ourselves. In the end, if we don’t come to peace with it, if we can’t resolve it, we haunt ourselves.”
Your face—a face I hadn’t seen in months—stared up at me. You stared up at me. Here I was, looking into your eyes while you stared back into mine. In that moment, we were together again, gazing into each other’s souls.
You once said to me that you and I existed outside this plane, where space and time were wound into a ball and not in a straight line. We would always be together because we had always been together. We were acting out all our moments simultaneously right now. Ghosts, you had told me, were time travelers not bound by the here and now.
“You don’t know me, Aaron. I love you and we’ve got something great between us, but you really don’t know me.”
“One thing I know,” you said, “is that the longer you spend in darkness, the easier it is for that darkness to become reality. It takes form, it gains life. I’ve spent a lot of time in darkness, Aaron, so much so that I’ve churned it up and stirred it to the surface and made it this real, tangible thing. It lives alongside me. It moves when I move. It’s in the bedroom right now, waiting for me to come back.”
“When you spend so much of your life sifting through dark and terrible things, you give those things the power to become real. The ghosts don’t leave you alone.”
But then it occurred to me that when I reached Peter Sloane’s age, there would be no you there to worry about me. No gentle hand grazing the back of my head. I would be alone.
I felt aloof, disembodied, and needed to watch other people in real situations just to anchor myself to the real world.
The only truth in all of this, Allison, was that you had been a stranger to me. An absolute stranger—this other-Allison operating under a cloak of deceit throughout the duration of our marriage. It took your death and the insight of strangers to get me to realize this.
You and I exist outside this plane, where space and time are wound into a ball and not in a straight line,
We will always be together because we have always been together. We are acting out all our moments simultaneously right now. Ghosts are time travelers not bound by the here and now.
I was searching for you, tortured by your absence. Torturing myself.
