Her voice, unheard by anything but my memory for what seems like an eternity, drifts in and out of my head. The sweet lullaby of her laugh rocks me gently into dreams. When the fog of sleep approaches, I swear I can feel her hands on my face. I hear her whisper "I love you." In the way that could, without fail, make me forget that the curtains in the front hall were always just a bit crooked.
But when I have fallen, screaming and kicking into the dream, I can never run fast enough, never scream loud enough, and over and over I see the only light to ever grace my existence evaporate. Again and again, my world implodes. I wonder, for the millionth time, why I continue without my soul. Why I still awake every morning to a cold pillow beside me.
When I scream into consciousness once more, the pain is so great, and I'm imploding all over again, and she's not there to wipe away my fear.
To numb the fierce gash left inside my soul, I carefully observe the tiniest details of the room, bathed in the faint pinkish glow of the sunrise, and I notice that the light switch isn't perfectly straight, or there's a tiny speck of dust on the bedspread. Anything is better than the images replaying again and again in my head. Straightening photographs is always better than the fear that someday I won't be able to flawlessly conjure her voice from the depths of memory.
And so I stay, mind half blank, in my tiny box, caught between the pain of remembering, and the fear of forgetting.
On occasion, I hear her voice in my head. Telling me- just as she had precisely one year, three months, and six days before the light left the universe- that she would someday desert me. That someday, one of us would be carried away on the wings of death. (She never stopped being poetic.) Her warm hands stroked my face, and her wide, beautiful eyes burned as she whispered that I was never to consider ending my life for her sake- no matter how great the pain got.
Her words on that warm night are the only things that stay my hands as I search for something to end the pain.
Every time I want to simply be numb, I settle for the memory of the soft caress of her hand and the faint remembrance of her arms wrapped around my neck. I fall asleep knowing that the horror of losing my better half will unfailingly wake me screaming at the end of the night.
Yet, I still lie there, waiting for the horror, as her breath tickles my neck, and her name tattoos itself on my mind, again and again, carrying me downstream on the memories of her.
