A bitter smile of memory

Middle of the night, while the city slept, deep in dreams to be forgotten once the morning alarms beep, my hands pointed the steering wheel toward a place that was once nearly a second home. The streets were still, hardly a stir, few lights shown through the curtained windows lining my path down the roads of my recent past.

At the foot of that building where my heart was once resident, my foot hit the brake, stick pushed to park, engine left on. Though there could be no need to flea from this scene. He’d broken his pledge to this place even before he’d broken his pledge to me. There we stood together in the darkened silence, those he’d left and likely forgotten.

I thought of the days when he lived in both of us. Filling her halls with his strumming, her shelves with his books, her closets with rounds for his shotgun, propped up against his best suits. While within my heart, he kept his grace and candor. In my mind, his wit planted sturdy roots. And in my body, I felt the warmth of his tender strength. Now we both stood in the darkness, empty. With none but his memory to fill the hole of his absence. Or has another entered her halls? Decorated with their life’s images on her walls? The windows are dark, the balcony bare, but there could be another breathing sleeping breaths in her air.

I held my phone in my palm, tapped here and there, saw those unread messages left ignored ’til just then. My finger swiped through a few keys to respond with apologies. Just hours before I’d missed that date, the one an old friend had sought for a reconnect, in hopes I’d want to stay late. Maybe next time I’ll show, give my heart just a little, casual go.

They say it’s better to have loved and lost. Loss. That’s the feeling that swells within as I stand, blaring some music my ears don’t hear, in the shadow of the memory of him.

After we’d said goodbye, gaps opened in my heart that were once filled by the little moments that stole my breath, interrupted the rhythm my heart beat sang. We lay suspended in space and time, just there, perched on the balcony hanging right above my head. We hung in a hammock of brightly colored cloth, swaying back and forth, intertwined in the arms of love. In the warmth of our bodies pressed together, making us one, we poke and we stroke and we tickle, playing those child-like games of love. The sun comes out from behind a cloud and lands on my face. I felt a warm glow brighten my checks, coming not from the sky, but from the depths of his clear green eyes. His hand follows that ray of light, brushing a stray lock to the side. I grab his hand as he starts to take it away and pull him back to my face to land my lips squarely on his in a deep and lust-filled kiss. Not wanting to break away, resisting the separation of even a half an inch, we embraced closer and closer, barely parting our lips for a breath. We breathe through each other, a method I’d never accomplished until I found him. When my lips dance with his, not even my lungs have any other needs. We hold and squeeze and playfully bite and smile until, giggling and stepping with a skip, we shuffled into his room and shed all the barriers between our skin.

Within those walls, we lived in a secret world, made for only two. Until one night he came home drunk and alone. I’d been hoping, but not much expecting to see his name pop up on my phone. Somehow in his stupor he’d driven safely home. He dropped to his bed, and, though he could barely stand, lit a candle at his side before finally laying down his head.

It didn’t take long for the apartment to start screaming. “Help, help!” it shouted, in the form of its fire alarm beeping.

Flames engulf that little world, the one we’d created to hide from the outside. Notebooks of half-formed images that haunted our days, now submit to the all-consuming flames. At his feet, in his sleep, the mattress catches deep. No hope of another lazy summer morning on that bed half-asleep. All of the days that could’ve been, go up in a life-threatening whirl-wind.

The alarms didn’t interject into his mind during this much-needed rest. It took his roommate shouting across the flames to awake him to that mess.

Smoke billowing down the hall. Black ash spreading across those beloved walls. Ash made from the things we’d once loved. The hammock where we’d sit in the sun. The table where we’d drink after the day was done. Even the more nefarious ways we liked to have fun. All turned to ash and painted across the floors and walls, the art of destruction filling rooms and halls.

Reports stat that no one was hurt, but there were some that never emerged. Casualties were the way the light through the window hit his skin, the sound of the birds rustling through greenery during our morning cigs, the echo down the halls when he strummed his tunes, and, of course, the home for all of those little things we knew.

Those happy moments hardened into memory, as those holes in my heart swelled with fear of never again seeing a day as I once did.