without her

The words aren’t formed as thought words in his mind; but the feeling is gnawing. Occasional moments of relief come as a sort of distance from the feeling. A silly video. The cat. Its absence is barely lived before he’s again consumed with added weight.

If there were words, they would probably be “I should have done more”.

Those moments he tried to find her attractive still, as her fear and his stood between them like a wall. Others where he wanted nothing more than to touch her, and she couldn’t let him.

The gulf between them narrowed and expanded simultaneously when she became weak with the drugs. Surgery had been more straight forward; it was procedural with targets and a recovery schedule. He had been the capable man. Been there. Taking care.

She wrote a lot more in her journal then, pages each day in that neat writing. He loved her neat writing, perfectly formed characters like a printed font. Although unmistakably handwritten, feeling the ridges and valleys of biro ink against his fingers as he turns the pages.

He wants to be able to cherish her. To relive those indescribable moments of love before she was ill with joy, or at least fresh pain. But his memories of her feel wrung out. Over played and fuzzy like an old VCR. He leaned so heavily on them through her illness they are tainted with the smell of hospital cleaning chemicals and desperation.

Pain is a strange creature, residing somewhere deep, peaking intermittently. Located somewhere where there is no separation between our bodies and our minds. Endlessly riding what feels like the edge of tolerable. In so many moments it isn’t tolerable, but he keeps existing to experience it. The world feels like it should have ended already so many times over. But not for him.

He gets to survive. Survival means the continuation of this pain, without the reassurance of her presence and her pain too. Without the reassurance it will ever ebb. Survival means pervasive numbness allowing him to live but removing the meaning of living. He has tried to find that thing. Some essence of life within himself or just the memory of it. But it evades.

The tired memories of happiness do nothing. The recent memories of her failing body feel more intense. He leans into them hoping that if the pain gets intense enough it will break him. Or break over him. Like a wave braking, a bubble bursting. Allowing him to breathe again. To feel something.

Turning to the back of the well-thumbed journal. He rereads the shaky letters of her last entries. They are for him, for her mother and her family. And maybe for herself as well. They are reassurances. Through those words he perceives the intangible substance that connects us to our bodies and each other. Something like the possession of faith but not the faith itself. Perhaps love.

There was no guidebook for this, no pointers or landmarks. He had read the five stages of grief. Each day convincing himself he was in this stage or that, but never feeling any different.

In May he’d told her again that he wished they could swap places; she’d looked at him so sadly. He hadn’t understood, but now he did. Maybe any illness is easier to shoulder than to bear witness to. Maybe lack of any future is less scary than a future without love. Why hadn’t he understood the look in her eyes. There were infinite moments with her that he had not understood well enough or cherished hard enough.

How could he value it as it deserved, this precious life. Those were words he’d heard echoed around her death. Spoken in hushed tones. No body’s words had made sense then. It was just a sea of well-meaning platitudes under grey skies and indistinguishable guests in black. He’d stood, an unlit monument to young love, all but dead himself. Grey faced. Nodding.

A celebration of her life it was not.

Time. He’d endlessly wished for more time. More time for her, with her. Now time was supposed to heal. All he felt was worn by it. The passage of time seemed marked only by the mounting of bills from the life they had planned together. Those memories, the ones of the fantasies, they still stung. The ideas of nesting and creating life between them. The foreseen but underestimated chaos of children would never be theirs. They had grieved this jointly during her treatment, but the hope of her survival had upstaged it in his heart. Now though the loneliness of her loss was redoubled by these phantom children.

He needed air.

The small soft black notebook in his hands was supposed to have held her journey, to be placed on a shelf after her recovery. To help her move through it, to help her move past it. It was never intended to be the monument to her life that it had become. His insight into her mind. His obsession, as he tried to assuage his guilt. He had not been perfect. All indiscretions tore at him. The time he complained to his friend about her exhaustion. The way he’d felt when his eyes met those of another. The silent wishes he’d made that it all be over, one way or another. Now it was over, and this was so much worse.

He’d stopped leaving space for her beside him in their bed about two years ago, it was a boyish and petty attempt to find an upside. But as he stretched his limbs out in bed, enjoying the equally familiar thrill and guilt, he wondered at the idea of sharing this bed again.

The idea of love seemed so alien in the dark world of his mind. Any real pleasure or joy had evaded him since she had passed. He’d had sex. You know the kind, where there is little thought beyond rubbing against each other long enough for one, or both of you, to climax. There was one girl who kept visiting him, but he couldn’t bring himself to be kind to her. Eventually he told her to stop coming. He couldn’t bear the kindness she showed him, when he was nothing but cold.

Life felt hollow, hollow but heavy. Like his own light had been extinguished. The movies always seem to depict some sort of rescue by a well-meaning woman. Maybe this was the fantasy his most recent lover had been hoping to live out. Or meeting eyes with a new soul mate. Or a dog. Maybe a dog would help. But the cat wouldn’t like that. Fucking cat, he’d never wanted a goddamn cat in the first place. It is eternally mind blowing that some people think that pets are an appropriate gift. At least that still made him laugh, they had laughed about it together. Him and Claire, her silly friend buying them a goddamn cat.

Oh god her laughter. The phone lays by his bed, all those videos of her right there. He scrolls back to before she was ill, the trip they took to Robin Hoods Bay. Her hair, he can smell her hair when he watches the video of her on the beach. He remembers the smell of the sea on her salty skin as he buried his face in her neck that evening. His body responds as if he were standing behind her right now. He opens WhatsApp and opens their ancient history. Watching back the videos she used to send him. He knows them all inside out. He knows the layers of her arousal from knowing her. He knows the videos from watching them over and over. He hates himself for it. He wants to let her rest in dignity. He doesn’t want her to continue to exist only in his mind, and worse in his jerking off.

He knew she’d want him to move on. He had life left to live. Live it, live it for both of us she had said. There were words in her journal where more of her was revealed. She wrote that she had loved being loved by him, and how she saw him come alive in loving her. That she couldn’t bear the thought that his face would never light up like that again. And here he was still letting her down. Miserable, empty.

Like a starving creature he hunted within himself for something, anything. A scrap that he could build himself from.

Sunlight streams across the room in a bright stripe, turning the dust into magical specks dancing through it. Concealing the mess in shadows for another day. The crumpled cheque was still pinned up. The $20,000 would be useful. But it was hers. Or for her, or something. The trial drugs had been for hope, not for profit. Truthfully, he didn’t want the ease it would bring, although she'd have wanted that. Instead, he walked past it again.

Did the thought come to him or was it something he heard one day whilst he wasn’t concentrating? Either way it burrowed into him, until he could think it out loud.

He doesn’t want to feel better.

Any good feelings felt like betrayal. They are denied before they even surface. He wants his grief to be as deep and crushing as he can bear. He wants his pain to be the equal of his love and her life in opposite.

Eventually the light catches his attention, streaming, bright, almost painful to look at. The darkness around it is thick. Thick and heavy. And like his interior looks full of threatening shapes and gaping holes. Perhaps then the pain is like the shadows and can never be measured against the light. But like the light, sat with and experienced.

A feeling starts to seep into his bones, recognisable perhaps, as peace.