{the things that you hear are the things that are here forever now
and the words that i write are the words that they don't want you to hear}
It was around two in the morning, every morning, that the blue-white light of a computer monitor would seep around the cracks of the old wooden door. The sudden sound of a clicking keyboard squandered the stillness of the night. The faithful watch-hound, in his basket beside the stairs, would slowly lift his head at the sound. His nose would twitch once, twice, then his head would settle back onto his legs as it had been nestled before. The typing, in fact, became so routine that the hound, though still pausing to lift his head and sniff, remained asleep for the ordeal.
Up the oaken stairs, past the sleeping hound and through the time-worn door was a very lonely little room, made lonelier still by the shadows cast about by the computer screen's light. The larger-than-life shadow of brass bedposts adorned the back wall. It was interrupted by a small dormer with a window and skewed by a bookcase littered with odd, small trinkets and an out-of-place toothbrush.
The covers of the bed were mottled in the bottom corner; not odd, considering their occupant's restless position at the computer. The man's left leg jittered restlessly, his fingers quivered as they floated over the keyboard. His head tilted down toward the laptop, the tip of his nose pointing perfectly to the pivot of keyboard and monitor. With his brow furrowed and his lips pursed, the screen's light played nasty tricks on his age lines.
He lifted a hand and ran it down his face, all the while shaking his head. He leaned back in the chair, which rolled backwards a bit from the shift in his weight, looked to the ceiling, and sighed deeply. The sigh slowly morphed into what first sounded like stifled laughter, but soon proved to be muffled sobs as the light, playing worse tricks on his face now that it pointed up his chin, revealed the silhouette of a man mourning his existence in a perpetual dark night of the soul.
There were two windows open on the distraught man's computer screen. At first glance, one would think these were two copies of the same file. They both told a tale of love and loss; of trust stolen, broken, and otherwise mangled to indistinguishability; and they each begged forgiveness of their yet to be alerted recipients. In fact, some passages from each document were indeed word-for-word identical, but the documents, no. The documents were far from identical.
The first one, the one on the left, the one he felt he needed to write - that one would never, ever be sent. They'd heard all they needed to; they wouldn't believe a thing he told them, no matter how many times he said it. No matter how much thought or emotion he put into it, the words would be read as those of a liar and a hypocrite. They could never be the words from a husband to a wife, from a father to a son, for every title had been ripped from him by his own hand.
That was probably the hardest thing for him to admit. Honestly, if he'd accepted that fact, he wouldn't be awake at two in the morning composing a letter to his ex-wife and children begging to be taken back and loved and put things back the way they were before. He couldn't bear the fact that he'd single-handedly destroyed everything that mattered to him, everything that made him feel alive, everything that kept his heart beating and his lungs breathing and his mind dreaming of hope and possibility.
But the second one, the document on the right – that was the one he knew he needed to write, and that one could never, ever be sent. It was much, much longer that the letter on the left. The letter that, having read the one on the right, was clearly addressed to the people he merely thought he loved the most. The second letter, though lost in miles of circuitous apologizing, rationalization, anger, and back around again, professed one theme above all: undying love.
It is this love, this crazy, stupid, reckless, so-wrong-but-so-right love that pulls the man from one side of the bed to the other until the sheets wrap around his legs and pull them together like the wrappings of a mummy. It is this love that drags him out of bed at two in the morning to sit at a cramped little desk and hunch over a laptop and blind his night-seeking eyes with the blue light of a screen. It is this love that compels him to write more and more each night, and it is the guilt of this love that makes him pull up the other document and try to convince himself that his love didn't lie in the wrong places. The word counts beg to differ.
It is this love that, after an hour or two of emotional upheaval and frenzied typing, forces the man to pause and think. When he thinks, he remembers. When he remembers, he shudders.
He doesn't want to remember.
Remembering floods his soul with the why, and it pulls him down so hard he fears he may drown.
Joe Miller does not spend his sleepless nights mourning the loss of his wife or his children. He doesn't even mourn the murder of Danny Latimer at this point. The only demon haunting his dreams, squeezing his heart until all the built-up emotion pours out of his eyes, is the man whose face, looking ever more defeated by the day, stares back at him in the mirror.
hey, look, it's me! (Morgan, for those of you who haven't read anything by me before and/or never heard of Forever, the fandom from which I first hail) I might have binged Broadchurch last week and even though I know the third series is coming soon, I thought I'd explore Joe in the aftermath of the case. This was just a quick one-off and I'm a little nervous to dip my feet in a new fandom...(: so here, a little morsel to tide us over until series three premiers, whenever that is. The Internet's not being all that forthcoming on the matter...