The Ways of Life and Love

Boxes and papers lay scattered across the carpet, and the shadows of that final night kissing the sun goodbye as it went to sleep peeked in through the blinds, throwing swirls of fading light across the walls. Michael Holloway leaned against his couch from the floor, a glass of Bourbon in one hand.

A sigh, and an additional shadow bloomed across his face from the presence standing over him. “You’re doing it again. You always do this.”

He laughed, more of a huff of disbelief but neither of them said anything on the matter. “You’re one to talk aren’t you?”

Theo leaned down to his level, trying to catch his eye, but Michael refused to meet it. “I never meant to hurt you, Michael, but I can’t keep watching you ruin yourself like this. Neither one of us can help what happened, it just…happened.”

The glass that had been twirled in his hand, the liquid spilling around inside nearly to the point of sloshing over the side, stopped, and Michael laughed — an airy hiccup of a sound dripping in exhaustion and simmering anger. Theo’s eyes flickered, ever familiar with the look in Michael’s, the crescendo before the final stand. “It wasn’t supposed to happen,” he muttered, shaking his head before it upturned and in that moment, he was no longer speaking to the man in front of him. “Not to him, you hear me?!” he shouted, and he could see Theo jump in the corner of his eye, every wary of his fiancé's pendulum of emotions, particularly when he’d been drinking. Michael’s anger could dissipate in a small number of directions — the rarest of which was the sobs that his shouting broke down into. The anger momentarily resurged with Michael chucking the glass against the wall, and the crystals shimmered against the carpet beneath the window.

Theo took a shaky breath as Michael finally caught his eye, and the tears were the most genuine Theo had ever seen them. This was Michael, this was the love of his life. He hadn’t seen those eyes since the day Theo agreed to marry him, to make their little family complete after so long. Lizzie had been ecstatic, and Michael had simply cried. Those tears were different. They brought him back to hospital rooms and long, restless nights, nights he didn’t want to go back to.

“I wish…I wish you had been stronger,” Michael coughed. “I wish I had been stronger.”

“You were strong for such a long time, even when I couldn’t be. You held us together, and it was only a matter of time before the walls started to crack.”

“I broke you. I broke us. What happened happened to the both of us, and I just couldn’t let it go. I put you through Hell for months and all you tried to do was help. Now look at us!”

Theo leaned in closer, and Michael could feel his lips against his forehead, his hand tracing his jawline, like a whisper against his skin. “I love you. I have loved you since the day I met you, and I will love you for the rest of my life, but I have to go. I’m so sorry this had to end like this.”

Theo stood, not looking back until he reached the front door of their little house. He considered his hand for a moment, fiddling with the silver band on his finger, before he opened the front door and regarded Michael one more time. “Goodbye, my love.”

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He had sat there for so long that the steady beeping in the background had become white noise, filtering in and out of the chatter and occasional alarms going off for people that were not his fiancé, people lying in different hospital beds with different tubes and wires poking out of them and in different stages of life. The door opened, and he didn’t look up, constantly on guard for any movements, sounds, any sign of him getting better.

“Dad, when’s the last time you slept? You always do this,” Lizzie sighed, dumping out the vase on the side table and moving to the sink in the conjoined bathroom to put in fresh water and the not-dead flowers she had bought from the gift shop downstairs. “It’s not healthy, and you know Pop would not want you ruining yourself like this.”

“I know, dear,” Theo sighed, taking another sip of the lukewarm coffee a nurse had kindly brought him some time ago. “I just can’t bring myself to walk into that house.”

“You know you can catch some sleep at my house. Jack made up the guest room in case you needed some time away. Or I could ask a nurse for a cot and you can stay here. I’ll keep an eye on Pop.”

“I can’t, I just…Your father will wake up soon, I’m sure of it. I have to be here when he does.”

Lizzie’s eyes flickered over to the bed before the rest of her body followed, and she took in the pale skin, the circles under his eyes, the machine doing the job of his liver. “What if he-?”

“Don’t say it. Please,” Theo snapped, shaking his head and falling back into his chair, heaving for breath. “The nurses and the doctor, they…that is all they’ve said all morning, and I cannot hear it again. Just…let me be with my husband, Lizzie, please? If today is the last day I see him, the last day I have him, then let me have him.”

Lizzie cleared her throat as she choked back tears and turned at the sound of footsteps stopping, seeing her own husband in the doorway. “We’re going to go finish cleaning up the house. Call me or Jack if you need anything?” Theo didn’t make a sound, and Lizzie sighed, leaning in to give each of her fathers a kiss on the cheek before she and Jack took their leave.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The funeral had come and gone, and finally, the only two people left in his house were him and Lizzie. Jack had gone back to take little Mikey from the sitter and take him home. Lizzie had stayed back and offered to have a small dinner with her father, utilizing all of the sympathy meals neighbors, friends and family members had brought over. That night’s meal was Jack’s mother’s broccoli cheddar casserole, cornbread made by their neighbor two doors down, and chicken soup made by Mrs. Wilson upstairs.

Before they packed up the last boxes and headed back to Lizzie and Jack’s, Lizzie stopped Theo in the living room. “I found something while Jack and I were cleaning and packing things up yesterday. You know I don’t like to read personal things, but I went to wash the pillowcases and it fell out. It had Pop’s name on the envelope, and I was curious what he would keep in such a place…”

“It’s alright, Lizzie. What did you find?”

She handed him what was at some point a white envelope, now stained by time, tears, and fading, stretched out black ink. ‘To my darling Michael’, was written across the middle of it in what was unmistakably his handwriting, and his eyes went wide as he recognized the object.

“He kept this?” he asked himself, and he gently peeled back the envelope. A letter in only slightly better condition than the envelope plopped out and landed at his feet. With his hands shaking, he picked it up and unfolded it.

“Did you…Were you going to leave Dad?” Lizzie asked. “You two never mentioned breaking up or divorce?”

“No, no, it wasn’t anything like that,” Theo assured her, reading over those words he had poured onto the page ten years ago. He gestured for Lizzie to sit with him on the couch and braced himself for a conversation he had planned to happen someday, with his husband by his side. Now, he had to brave it alone.

“Your father and I met twenty-two years ago when we were Juniors in High School, but you know that.” Lizzie nodded. Her Pop had described the day they met like a movie he’d seen a thousand times, memorized every detail of every scene of. The light rain, the way Pop had been riding his skateboard in the park across the street from the school. ‘Your dad thought I was ‘so cool’, he tried everything to talk to me,' he'd laugh. 'Even tried to pick up skateboarding himself, and he was terrible at it! He had no balance whatsoever! Finally, one day he was giving it another go, and I happened to be there. My friends had seen him fall and started laughing at him, until I helped him up. I didn’t talk to them much after that. Truthfully, they were all jerks. I started hanging out with Dad, and I even taught him how to skate just a little!’

“It was about five years after we’d graduated. We had been moved in together for quite some time, and we had started having talks about getting married and kids and all that.”

“And then I came along, right?”

“Your father loved telling a good story so much I hardly have to tell it!” Theo laughed, and nodded, taking her hand. “But yes. We took you home with us, and we loved every single second of it. You were the apple of your Pop’s eye, of course, but your father being a lawyer, he worked a lot. I didn’t mind staying home and taking care of you, of course! I’m the one that offered actually, until at least you were old enough for us to trust leaving you with a sitter.”

Lizzie had a curious glance, thinking back over her younger years. “I never had a sitter.”

Theo had a gentle, sorrowful smile on his face. “No, you didn’t. All of that changed when we found out you were sick.” He paused a moment, and Lizzie reached over to the water bottle she had taken with her from the kitchen, unscrewing the cap and handing it to her dad. He took a few sips, dotted at his mouth with the collar of his shirt, and handed it back to her. “They found it in your brain, and we were lucky they caught it as early as they did, but the toll it took on me and your father… We had so many restless nights, taking turns sleeping in your room at the hospital. Sometimes the nurses had to order us to go home or threaten security, and those were the really bad nights when neither of us had slept more than a wink in days. They were understanding, constantly assured us that you were going to be fine, but we couldn’t process it, not until we saw it for ourselves. All we saw was you in that bed, hooked up to those machines.”

“So…the letter was-”

“Your father had started drinking when you got sick,” he admitted. He didn’t like to talk about it, the nights he would find Michael curled up in bed with a bottle of whiskey on the side table, or slumped on the couch with his fourth glass of bourbon in an hour. “He stopped the night that he found this letter on the kitchen table, and me on the bedroom floor. I had taken the last of his whiskey and the meds he had from a minor skateboarding accident he’d had on his way to class one day. Well, I guess it’s safer to say he stopped the morning after. As soon as he knew I was going to make it, and I finally spilled about everything I had been feeling. Actually…” his eyes went distant for a moment before he smiled, looking at his daughter’s face. “We got the news that you were in remission two days after they told me I could go back home.”

“All of that because I got sick?”

“Because we couldn’t handle you getting sick. Truthfully, we’d grown apart a little bit before that. I guess that just didn’t help things, but that is not your fault! You were our everything. You held us together for so long, but you can’t rely on other people to hold your relationship together. None of us could help what happened, it just happened. Sometimes life happens that way. But we realized that maybe we had rushed our lives a little bit and everything just sort of…caught up to us. We still loved each other, and we both loved you so much, sick or not. I guess we just…needed more help than we cared to admit.”

Lizzie looked outside where the sun peeked in through the tree line. “...This is all just so sad. I’m sorry that happened, dad.”

“Don’t be,” Theo hummed, pulling her into his side and leaning his head on hers. “I loved your father since the day I met him, and I will love him for the rest of my life. And I know he loved me too. We all just…went through a really hard thing, and sometimes that’s life.”

“Pop was just getting his life back on track. It isn’t fair.”

“Well, kiddo, that’s just how it is sometimes. But, you’ve got a perfectly healthy and wonderful fella waiting for us to get back, and I want to see my grandson! Let’s quit all this moping and head on out!” Lizzie got up and lifted the last box she had packed before and headed out the door, but stopped when she realized her father was not following. He noticed and smiled. “I’m ready, I promise. Just…Can you give me one moment?”

She nodded and left her father in the living room. He leaned back against the couch, and read every word he’d written that night. Tears perked in his eyes as he remembered Michael’s words to him in the hospital three days later, when he’d finally woken up. He told him how touch and go it had been, how terrified he’d been the entire time. He told him how he hadn’t even had the heart to tell Lizzie and that night, they agreed they wouldn’t. Not for quite some time, at least.

Finally, Theo Holloway rose from his couch, and tucking the letter back in its envelope, took a hold of the door handle, looking back into his home one last time. “See you around, love.”