She missed him so much. She missed him with a constant, aching pain deep inside her body that throbbed whenever she attempted a smile. She missed him so much that a shadowy, ghostly image of his face seemed to have been tattooed inside her brain, making it impossible to think about anything else, or put it aside.
Shannon would lie huddled in a ball at night, breathing in his scent, her hand over her heart as she tried to imagine it was his pulsating beat against her palm instead of her own. When Shannon fell into fitful, unreliable sleep, it was thoughts of him that plagued her mind – every smile, every glare, and every flicker in his eyes. And when she woke up as dawn crept into the sky beseechingly the next morning, with the same amount of luster as it had yesterday, his jacket was stained with her tears, her face moist and damp with saline, like she had stained his heart for all those years.
There were only a few moments when she felt at peace with herself in the week after he died. In the innocent brevity before she fully awoke, she would lie unknowingly in the morning summer sun, rainbows in the closed crescents of her eyes, as his jacket gave off his scent much as it had when he was alive. When Shannon opened her eyes, the sun became glared and strangely odious, and she wondered when the smell on the jacket would fade like his body, deep under the ground of this island.
The island didn't look any different to others, but to Shannon, it had changed. The once moist, hot sand, was now grainy, and the crashing waves now merely rocked back and forth tepidly, and the sun seemed now to filter itself from its once unadulterated light. Everything seemed to have filtered itself – reflections from transparent to translucent, and the world was numbed and spinning, allowing her only to feel mere shards of emotions that she picked up in pieces like sea glass on the beach.
In the morning, she knew that she would never again be greeted by the flits of silver freckles that sparkled in his blue eyes, but in the last few strains of unconsciousness, she could have sworn that the life in his eyes throbbed within her. And every breath she took, every beat of her heart, was now for him. She had always lived solely for her self, but now she was breathing his breaths, and whispering his voice and dreaming his dreams. It was what got her through each painful day she scraped through – she was living for him now.