Life After Gwen

Preface: Part I

Musing through memories,
Losing my grip in the grey.
Numbing the senses,
I feel you slipping away.
Fighting to hold on,
Clinging to just one more day
Love turns to ashes,
With all that I wish could say..

I'd die to be where you are.
I tried to be where you are.

Digital Daggers - "Still Here"

The blood spread across her breast like the most delicate rose, its deep scarlet petals blossoming across her chest, staining her blouse the further it spread. I began to panic as my hands pressed against the rose to crush it and keep its petals from blossoming. But this wasn't a rose. It was blood. And it was spurting from her chest at an alarming rate.

"P-Peter..." It was Gwen who was bleeding out in front of me. Her cherry lips gasped for air like a beached fish, eyes wide with fear. I began to scream her name as her blood squeezed through my closed fingertips. I stared down at my bare hands as they turned red from blood. Suddenly, they weren't my hands – they were Spider-Man's. I looked up and it wasn't Gwen who was dying in front of me… It was Mary Jane.

Every night, it was the same nightmare: Gwen dying a million, horrible deaths and always by my hands. Two weeks after she died, one week after her funeral, Mary Jane started appearing in my nightmares. The rational part of my brain told me that it was simply a reaction to the guilt I harbored from Gwen's death – the other part of my brain… the irrational part… told me it was an omen of Mary Jane's fate if she didn't untangle herself from my web.

After Gwen's death, Mary Jane refused to leave New York. She refused to leave my side. I know she meant well enough but every night, in the early hours of the morning, I would return to the apartment, bruised and broken from chasing and searching for the Green Goblin, and every night, without fail, I would find her fighting the throes of sleep, head bobbing, tiny body tucked into the corner of the living room sofa. It was in these moments that I became irrational – angry even.

"Why don't you just go home?" I called wearily from the kitchen as she pulled herself from the couch, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She shuffled over to where I stood.

"I made pancakes." She spoke softly from behind me as I opened the fridge and peered inside.

"For dinner?"

"I… I'm not a very good cook. It's the only thing I know how to make well-"

"Why don't you just go home?" I repeated my words, impatience showing plainly through. Every moment she spent in New York, she was in danger.

I peered into the fridge. There was nothing inside except for the small stack of leftover pancakes.

"…this is my home…"

"No," I laughed bitterly as I stood upright, slamming the door of the fridge. Everything inside the fridge trembled audibly. I turned to face her. This was one of those irrational moments that I'm not very proud of. My battered face grew hot as I spewed venom from my mouth, "This is Gwen's home. Not yours. Your home is in California."

Her demeanor didn't even change. Had she not heard the hurtful words I had just flung at her? She stood still for a moment, staring up into my angry face before finally side-stepping me and opening the fridge.

"I'll heat up the pancakes for you. Sit down at the table. It'll only take a second-" She was about to throw the pancakes into the microwave but I was already walking away from her, retreating into the dark cavern of my and Gwen's old bedroom.

Rage fuels the fire burning within my soul because being angry is better than the grief that threatens to tear me down at a moment's notice.

I need to be angry to keep moving forward.

I see nothing. I feel nothing. I'm a zombie whose only urge is to feed on the man who destroyed my life.

I need revenge. I need it so badly that my body aches whenever I'm still for more than a moment. Sometimes, I hear Mary Jane crying in the room next to mine. My ears hear everything – even her soft pleas to God for my return to reason but her pleas fall on deaf ears for there is no such thing as "reason" for the unreasonable. The dead know no "reason," and neither shall I.

By God, I will have my revenge.