He arrived late one night, his normally merry face streaked with tears. It's been a year, he said numbly, still half-shocked at the idea, and came inside.
He held onto you, shaking, and trying to make sense of what had been an aching lump of empty for twelve long months. He's been gone a year, he said, rocking back and forth a little. Why did he have to go? I miss him so much... You comforted him, tried to tell him somehow that it was all for the best, that he knew what he was doing -- but you yourself did not know the answer, and so you just sat there, in the dark, holding him and stroking his hair.
And then he buried his face in your shoulder, and you felt his shoulders quaking with efforts of restraint. Shhhh, you tried to say. Shhh...
He whispered from his burrow in your flesh. Can I stay here tonight? I've missed you so much. It's just not been the same since he left last year...
You nodded your consent, and sat him down on your bed. He remained there, limply, staring at the floor. You could not bear to see him so, and you sat down next to him and took his hand. He shivered at your touch, and quietly began to weep. There are times when I cannot stop thinking about him, about what we all used to be like, about what was taken from us, he said. Especially now. I've been wandering back over that road, and looking for him, or listening for his voice. But we haven't heard him sing since before, since long long before...
You confessed that you had been feeling much the same lately. The birds and the houses and the wide blue eyes of children steep in his name; they remind you at every turn that he's gone. And we weren't even that close to him, you wondered. At least, not like some others... The name of him who lost the most went unsaid; it would be too painful to speak it in this mood of night.
I think it is more that in him we lost everything about what was before,
he mused sorrowfully. It is as though I cannot quite see the first part of my life clearly anymore.You held him closer. He represented everything about that year in our lives. You'd think his absence might make it easier to bear, but it only reminds us of what isn't there anymore.
You huddled in the dark, arms wrapped around each other but not enough to keep out the memory of things gone by. Once again you felt you were being bourne away from safety, the only remnant of before in each other's grasp. You did not whisper to each other; you did not talk; you only shook, and squeezed your eyes shut. For if you opened them, all you would see would be each other and darkness, and that's how it was then, and you were exactly trying to escape that.
A collective tremor passed through you, and you shuddered deeply in unison. Then you whispered the other's name, and he responded, and you moved closer together, into the now -- and you held each other, breathing your way back into the world. The roof became solid again, and the sheets more real. You did not loosen your hold on him. The two of you lay there, thinking of more frightening days.
And then there was nothing. Just a room, and blackness, and two best friends in the night.