The idea for this story came to me when I was lying in bed, in the dark, listening to music. This is my take on why Connie chose to specialise in Cardiothoracic surgery, and why she only wears those infamous Louboutin shoes.
It is also my first attempt at first a person narrative- please don't let that put you off reading it, I just fancied having a go...
Echoes
I had the distinct impression, whilst standing on the university steps on that very first day, that something was beginning and something was ending.
I met you for the very first time, that day. I'd found myself somewhere between the library and the science laboratories. I remember the odd mix of chemicals and the musty smell of elderly books, two things so oddly juxtaposed that it made me uncomfortable.
I heard the squeak of rubber soled shoes behind me, and you placed your hand in the small of my back. I noticed your reflection in the window of the library before I turned. You were tall, your dark hair tufted out at one side as though you had been resting your head in your hand. You had blue eyes – the colour of the sea in winter; dark grey and blue flecked with white. Eyes that seemed never to look at me, but for me.
You look lost.
The first words you ever spoke to me. And I was lost.
I told you my name, and you walked with me the short distance to a lecture hall. It was only when you left me to stand at the front of the room, that I realised that you were our tutor. Prof. Joseph Sully.
-.-
It was a Tuesday when you first invited me to dinner. I didn't pause to consider whether or not this was allowed, I was twenty, and I was flattered. I accepted your invitation in the same breath that you asked it, and you smiled.
You knew from that moment that I was yours.
You took me to a restaurant in a side street just outside of the city centre. I don't remember it's name, if I did, perhaps I would go back. We shared platters of Spanish food and drank wine that cost more than anything I owned.
We walked back through the park and you showed me where you used to play as a boy, beneath the sloping boughs of a weeping willow. You told me how you loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath you; as a boy you took the hard root of the willow tree to be the back of a great horse, or the deck of a tumbling ship - it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for you said you felt the need for something which you could attach your floating heart to; the heart that tugged at your side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time whilst we walked; the heart that beat in time with mine.
We kissed for the first time beneath that tree, with the stars up high over head and the moon glowing lavender amongst the clouds. You took a Parma Violet from behind my ear and placed it onto my tongue, then you kissed me and told me that I tasted of flowers. I closed my eyes as your lips touched mine, how else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone...
-.-
There were many nights like that night. But I was aware all the same, that time would speed up and the future would appear before me, unrecognisable at first, for there I would be, a women who'd forgotten how long a summer could last. A woman who had spent each night kissing a man I shouldn't, beneath the arms of a weeping willow.
Perhaps somehow I knew what was to come?
For weeks that was all we did- kiss. You respected me. You didn't want to rush me – my first time. Instead we would walk the streets at night. Every evening we would walk the back alleys, behind the shops, we would by pass the truck that pulls up every evening at the bakery where it pumped flour into underground tanks. And the air was filled with white dust which never seemed to land.
-.-
The first time that you told me that you loved me, I laughed. We were standing, hand in hand, looking out across the river. And I laughed, not because I didn't believe you, but because I was relieved to discover that you felt the same.
You never said it again, you never got the chance. But as you said in your letter – and I still have it by my bedside- those in love do not always announce themselves with declarations and vows. But they are the ones who weep when you're gone. Who miss you every single night, especially when the sky is so deep and beautiful, and the ground so very cold.
-.-
I said nothing about you to anyone. No one. There was no body in the world who knew we loved one another except for ourselves, though looking back, I should think it was there in every moment, for everyone to see. How you looked at me, how I looked at you... but as anyone will will tell you who has had a secret love, it is in bed that you do your dreaming, in bed in the darkness where you cannot see your own cheeks pink, that you ease back the mantle of restraint that keeps your passion dimmed throughout the day and let it glow a little brighter.
-.-
That Christmas you bought me a pair of Christian Louboutin's. Shoes so expensive that the price tag left me breathless and it took you two or three attempts to teach me how to pronounce the name.
You smiled at that, and when you held my hand as I stood up in them for the first time, you told me how one day, I would be the most brilliant, most beautiful doctor in the world...a silly sentimental thing to say, but it was Christmas, a time when people told the truth, almost without meaning to.
-.-
We made love for the first time that night, in bed, my bed, surrounded by Christmas and everything it was. You smelled of wood smoke from the fire, and you tasted of mince pies and the sherry that your Grandmother had given you...the one you claimed to dislike, but seemed to drink rather a lot of.
You kissed me, you held me, you touched me so gently that it was all I could do to hold onto you, and as we came together you whispered to me, such sweet, little things, things I will never forget, things I will never put down on paper, for fear that seeing them there would take something away from them.
We lay together afterwards until the early hours of the morning. Despite the warmth we couldn't sleep, and you decided we would go for a walk along the river – we would watch the swans in the silver of the moon, we would trace patterns in the stars and hold hands and watch as our breath turned white as it touched the air.
You pushed a champagne bottle into the pocket of your coat as we left. We would drink champagne whilst we watched the swans, you said, the stars...the moon...we would drink to 'us'.
But we never did.
-.-
You died tonight.
A young woman – exactly my age- was mugged, do you remember? Do you remember how you stepped out in front of the attacker as he tried to run away with her bag? Do you remember how his knife cut through your coat, your jumper...your skin...? How it pierced your heart so deeply that you barely felt a thing? And as you lay shivering in my arms, you told me how beautiful I looked, how I had never looked more beautiful, and how you wished you could tell me that every single day for the rest of my life...
And when you died, with your head in my lap, and my hand against your chest, I told you I was sorry...because I hadn't known what to do.
I hadn't been able to save you, I'd left your heart to die against the palm of my hand...
-.-
I'm writing these to you, these notes...these letters, and there's a part of me that refuses to believe that I have nowhere to send them.
You died, and yet a little piece of you is still inside me – alive.
Where have you gone? It seems a silly thing to ask...but I feel as though I am choking – as though I am being held under water, and no matter how hard I scream (and God knows, I am screaming for you), nobody will hear. My lungs will just fill with water and I will drown. I'm drowning now. I can feel it.
I'm sorry I let you down.
When I close my eyes you are still with me. I can feel you around me, inside me. I can feel the touch of you on my skin, the taste of your lips-
You know, I left the bottle of Champagne just where you left it, on the bench looking out across the river? Who knows, perhaps somebody will find the unopened bottle of champagne and it will make them smile – they'll think two people in love left it there, two people so caught up with one another that they had forgotten all about it. Or maybe it will just be picked up by a drunk, or some kids who will think it funny to smash it into the waves. But maybe, just maybe a couple will find it, a young couple just starting out, and they'll think its a sign that they should be together, forever.
Just as we should have been.
-.-
I don't think I can live without you, Joe.
How can I go on living, when all I can hear are the echoes of your love around me? They're everywhere. You're everywhere. You're in the kitchen where you left a half drunk cup of coffee this morning. You told me I was beautiful as I stepped out of the bathroom and you never did finish it. You're in my bed. The sheets are still how we left them. The sheets still smell of you. Of us, together.
Is this it? Is this what I'm left with? Finding pieces of you wherever I go? Pieces of you...how long do I have to wait until I feel again. How long do I have to wait to think of you and not feel as though I want to die?
Or will it be forever that I feel you by my side, never quite touching me, never able to hold me, like an echo, answering me back only when I scream out for you...?
I digress.
I have been reduced to just a thing that wants you. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone...now there is just this...what I write now...as sketchy and complicated as it is: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with your beautiful turn of phrase, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn't even feel it. You'd clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you had become. You have broken down my defences. And I don't really resent it at all.
I forget sometimes that I am writing these letters...these notes, to you. Sometimes I get so carried away that I feel as though we are actually talking to one another again. Sometimes I wait to hear you pause, to hear that little hum you do when you are wondering what to say, the little furrow you get between your eyes when you're not quite sure what I meant, and the way you roll your eyes... and instead of questioning me, you...you would reach out for me, take my hand...kiss my lips...I miss those things, perhaps more than anything else, I miss those little things.
Why are the memories of these things never enough? Perhaps I'll never know. But there is one thing I know – I know that you are here, not in body, but somewhere you are with me. I feel you when I lay in bed at night, alone. I feel that thread that had come between us, tugging, tugging at my heart - so hard, it hurts me. A hundred times I almost turn to you, to press my forehead against yours; a hundred times I think of things to say to you, I hundred times I wish you could reply...
But I know you are there, somewhere...because you'll always be there, in the beat of my heart, in the whisper of the leaves of the old willow tree, in the echo of a silent room...
You'll always be there, and I'll always be here.
Until we meet again.
Yours.
Always yours.
Connie.
-.-
Please feel free to review, and let me know what you think. I'd love to hear feedback as this is so different to anything else that I've written.
Also, if you're interested, the song that inspired this piece is 'Echoes' by Bo Bruce. It's on YouTube. Please listen to it now, just because I feel like it needs to be a part of this.
Many thanks,
N x