Not A Love Story
#4 of Scraps/Drafts/Odds and Ends
This is not a love story.
Maybe, in some other scenario, it is. Maybe in some entirely separate parallel universe, there's a happily ever after to all of this. Maybe there's some reality where I'm looking at her face, and she's staring back at me, the both of us so wrapped up in the other that it's like the rest of the world fades away, and we, together, are all that matters.
Right now, it's hard to think of anything that matters. She's looking up at me, technically, her perfect face framed in short, dense, blonde fur. Fur that shines brightly in the contrasting light, disguising the pallor encroaching beneath. Her eyes stare back, unmoving, unblinking, as incapable of shedding a tear as I seem to be.
Her mouth hangs open, just a little, muzzle spread like she wants to tell me some parting words, a last desperate proclamation of the feelings we were supposed to realize in a few short days. No sounds remain, however, and the only thing that echoes in the silence are the few shards of glass crunching beneath my boots.
I can't bear to look at her chest: diaphanous white silk stained red and torn in ways that it never should have been. I can't bear to step a foot closer, to cross the boundary demarcated by the slowly congealing pool of blood that surrounds her like a perverse halo.
I wish I hadn't seen her this way. I don't want to remember the shattered, broken parts of her, lying ruined on a cold concrete floor. Somehow, there's only one part of her I can look at that doesn't make the pain too great.
I'm thankful that her face was spared even a trace of violence. It is the one part of her that, even now, remains perfect, and I do everything I can to commit even the smallest detail of her visage to memory. It is the least that I can do, after so unforgivable a failure.
The loop is closed; that, truly, was the bare minimum, to ensure that the one responsible saw no more days than she did. I don't afford his corpse any attention at all - his relevance ceased the moment his skull finally surrendered its integrity to the manifestation of my unthinking rage. The twisted gout of metal, that surrendered its own shape shortly after he did, still lies buried within him; held up by what remnants are left of what he was, standing up straight and shouting its mute victory towards an uncaring ceiling.
The bare bulb still sways from where it was disturbed - not much, anymore, but just enough to nudge the shadows in a tight, oscillating arc around me. I feel parts of him, wet and slimy and stinking of iron and overkill, clinging to the fur on my arms, slick between my fingers.
I can't feel anything of her at all. Her name, even, hurts too much to consider, to say aloud with my dry mouth and chalky tongue. Already, I can feel it slipping away; fragments of our brief time together drifting off into the ether of my stunned soul, but not before clutching at me with shards of pain and threatening to drag what remains of me along with them.
There is a part of me that wants to say that there, now, in mute observance of her shattered form, my life ends. There is a part of me that wants to lay down beside her and drift away from everything I am.
There is a part of me that wants, instead, to claw back time, pull myself to the moment before the primer ignited, the split second before an expanding wave of pressure drove the shard of metal forward through her, and live together with her in that one frozen, unending moment before, never growing, never changing, just reveling in everything that we were.
But I can't.
For the sake of what was, I walk up the dark, unyielding steps until I am once again above the surface. The storm shutters lay open to either side, seeming to part in my wake; I take them in my hands and set them back in place, one thudding against their hard concrete frame, and then the other.
I know that eventually someone will find her, find them, and questions will be asked, services will be held, the remainder dealt with in some programmatic way. To me, though, there is no closure in that. No truth in seeing her at rest in some fancy padded box, fixed up to look at peace, when all I will be able to see in front of my eyes is her staring up at me from that hard, grey floor. No - the moment I close the doors, that part of her must disappear away from sight, shrouded and protected by my own memories. Memories of life, of joy... of better times.
Not love, though. Like I said, this isn't a love story. Far from it. Love was one of those things with potential, with possibility, but I can't help but think that it died right there, locked behind her still, unblinking eyes, falling into the abyss along with the spark that faded beneath her pupils.
The world without her seems new, cold, not one in which love has any part to play. Not love, and not vengeance; the crime and the punishment had played out within a few frantic minutes, burning hot enough that nothing remained to inflict.
Everything I want and care about is over. Every motivation in my life seems extinguished. I want it, need it, to all spiral down, come apart at the seams and leave me devoid of any feeling at all.
The sun, though, still shines down from a rapidly clearing sky. I can feel its growing warmth permeating through my fur, all the way down to my skin. Life goes on all around me; birdsong echoes in the woods that lie on the other side of the street, branches rustle in the wind, a small, iridescent beetle alights for a moment on a chunk of flesh adhered to my arm, seeming to feed for a moment before flitting away.
The world hasn't stopped. The world hasn't cared. It's like there isn't any difference at all, or if there is, it's one that stops at the boundary of my own psyche.
She is gone. I'm not. And that leaves only one choice.
I walk forward, still hearing the bits of glass clinking together from where they're caught in the treads of my boots. I have a general idea of where I'm going, and how soon I'll get there.
Maybe, I wonder, someone will see the state I'm in, call the authorities, and my journey will be waylaid in a violent and unpredictable way. Somehow, though, I know that it won't. Strangely, I halfway feel like I have a plan - even if everything within me is destroyed, in a way it's almost a release from a bond, as there are things that I was restrained from doing before that nothing now stands against.
Even in the ruins of my own perceived world, there are still things to do. Things that must be done, if I am to preserve what's left, and reconstitute myself in any meaningful way.
Forward. One step at a time, one in front of the other, moving across asphalt and concrete while the sun beats down, oppressively present and impossibly distant. I move with what purpose I have left, thinking about what lies ahead. A pickup truck with a tank full of fuel. A forty-five-caliber pistol, well-serviced, loaded with the sort of hollow-points that are specially designed to tear as wide a swath as possible. At least one destination in mind, possibly more. Not vengeance, not justice, not anything like that. Just the result of a life long past becoming once again unchained.
I'd wanted love. I'd certainly prefer it. But this is not a love story, and what I have left to give is something else entirely...