"and then you were..."

And then you were gone. There was no warning. There was you. And then there was the memory of you. Words half spoken, laughter hilted by your absence, silence so profound that it was felt–a living breathing thing, heavy, and unrelenting. Only pieces of you remained. The smell of your shampoo on the pillows, coconut and vanilla, tainting the silk with waves of nostalgia that felt like punches to the gut. The smell of your perfume–jasmine and almond. The dress that you wore to dinner–red silk abandoned on the floor. Your hairbrush, strands of onyx black wrapped around it.

It was all a shrine to you. To the littered remnants of the life that you lived. The life that we shared. I couldn’t bear to disturb it. The traces of you that I cling to. One glance at the bare expanse of sheets where you should have been, sent my heart plummeting and my throat constricting with things that would never be said. There was that silence. Like a crushing weight. Sucking the air out of my lungs. Encasing my heart in stone and despair. Where there should have been you. Laughing, twirling tendrils of dark curls around your finger–the way that you always tended to do when you were lost in thought. There was nothing but icy tendrils and vast emptiness where there should’ve been warmth.

Did you know that this was the last night that you would ever draw a breath? Or laugh. Did you know as your arms clung to mine, as you wrapped yourself around me–it would be the last time I ever held you? Did you imagine the silence that would follow? The anguish that I would feel–that your mother, your father, every person who had ever been in your orbit, felt your warmth and your love–did you think about the wreckage that you would leave in your wake?

Did you care? About us. About the people you were leaving behind. Before you loaded that chamber of steel and destruction. Before you were nothing more than a corpse stained in crimson. Because I still don’t have an answer. And I don’t think I ever will.

I love you, Lysandra. And I’ll cling to the memories of you. And every breath that I take, every beat of my heart are nothing but a cruel reminder that you aren’t here. That your heart–just decaying muscle and flesh. Your lungs– just air sealed in stillness.

I’ll never forgive you. For leaving me with nothing but memories of you. But I’ll always love you. Even in death. Even as I scream into the silence you left behind.