One hundred photos

One hundred photos on the floor. One hundred pictures of life. One hundred moments of the past. I sit in front of them and try to hold back my tears. I try to hold myself. Arms tight around my legs, swinging softly from left to right. I don’t know why I took them out of the shadowbox. Why I tempted fate. I shouldn’t have done it. I see all my friends from the last years. Mum and dad. Libby. The furry face of Carlson. And you. With your cute smirk. Your mesmerizing dark eyes. Brown curls falling into them.

The sharp pain in my heart makes me breath harder. I want to get up and leave. Just leave everything behind. The photos, the room, the house, all of you. But I can’t move. All I can do is looking at your eyes, feeling the pain. The emptiness of the house is pushing onto my soul. And the tears can’t be hold back anymore. They’re running down my face like rain.

In my mind you’re standing right behind me. Smiling because I’m caught in the past like always. You’re taking a few steps closer to me. I feel you. You’re energy is washing over me. You touch my head. Begin to stroke my hair, play with it. You love that. I don’t but I don’t care as long as you touch me. “Come back, honey. The past is long gone.” You always say that when I sit in front of the pictures. “You should live here and now. It’s way more beautiful. Look out the window. Don’t you see the sun? She’s shining just for your today.” I close my eyes and bathe in your voice. You’re hands leave my hair and start drying my tears. Your fingertips in my face, your smell in my nose, your voice in my soul. It’s like flying.

But then the phone rings. Loud und surreal. I open my eyes, heart racing. I look around, panicking. But you’re gone. You’ve never been here. Not in so many years. You’re gone forever. And I am frozen in time with one hundred photos.

***

I remember it like it was yesterday. I know, people say that often. But I really do. It feels like yesterday. I don’t know how long ago it really was. Some part in me is sure, it was years ago. But I lost track of time. I can’t say for sure. All I know is that I remember. The moment they told me. The moment my world came crashing down. I was wearing a strange new shirt. I remember that, because I kept pulling it around on my body. It didn’t fit really well and I felt strange in it. All I wanted to do was to go home and change. But I couldn’t.

“Hey soulmate”, you used to say. You always smiled, when you said it. I liked it. It felt so right. But now I’m not sure anymore. If we were soulmates shouldn’t I have felt something? The moment it happened I was probably laughing, not knowing that life as I knew it just ended. That you just ended.
Your soul mate didn’t have a clue. So maybe we weren’t. Does that make our love any less… epic? It still feels that way. Epic and forever. Like nothing could stop it. But obviously there was something. Something very simple like death.

After the call I wanted to jump into the car instantly. They stopped me. Libby drove. Probably it was a good idea. If I would have driven that car, I pretty sure would have ended up at the same place as you. Right now I’m not sure that would have been a bad thing. We would have been together. Isn’t that what matters? Nevertheless, Libby drove. And I was riding shotgun, blind and deaf to everything around me. And so we drove to the hospital.

I hate white. White is not a colour. White is a joke. People associate it with good things. God, purity. Stuff like that. I associate it with death. Everything was white at the hospital. We ran down white halls, the doctor who waited for us wore white. Just everything in there seemed to laugh at me. “Haha! We’re white. We’re good. We’re pure and awesome. It’s you who is wrong.”
I felt black through and through. Not that I was able to feel more than that. My mind went into robot-mode. I could run and feel black but nothing more. I was like an alien in that house. And still I couldn’t have been the only one. It was a hospital after all, right?

The doctor talked a lot. How they did everything but the injuries were too severe. About what probably happened in the car and how tragic everything was. All I could think of was you laughing at me after I told you to drive carefully. “I always do that, honey.” And then I got angry. If you have been always so careful, how could something like that have happened? My emotions began to boil. Why the heck haven’t you been listening to me? I weren’t just being the overprotective wife you made me look like sometimes! I have been serious, damn it!
But you weren’t there to scream at so I unloaded all my anger on that doctor.

When they took me to see you I was numb. I exhausted all my energy on shouting stupid things. Now I was empty. You just lay there, eyes closed, hands folded. I waited for that feeling I always got, when I saw you. That tingling in my stomach. The jumping of my heart. But nothing came. It wasn’t you laying there. It was just your shell. The suit you were wearing at the time you were still with me. Your body lay there like a worn sweater. I stepped closer. It still smelled like you. For a second I thought about taking you home to cuddle with in my bed, like I always did with your shirts, when you were gone for a few days. But then my head got empty again.

Back home I didn’t know what to do. Everything felt wrong. I just sat on the couch, not moving, not thinking, barely breathing. Maybe a part of me thought that as long I didn’t really live, time wouldn’t pass, reality would stop following rules und and you wouldn’t be really dead. It took a few hours for me to realize, that wouldn’t help. You were dead. Gone forever and ever. And I was alone. And then I started to cry.

***

I often lay awake at night. And I always feel you next to me. Your body, big and safe and so close to me. I feel your skin on mine, the hair on your arms tickling me, so close and yet so far away. I want to grab you and pull you so close that we become one. I want you inside me. Not the way you would think if I could and would tell you. You’d smirk and laugh and wiggle your eyebrows. You’d tell me, that you can make that happen. But I don’t mean it that way. I want all of you inside all of me. Two bodies becoming one, breathing with the same lung, looking through the same eyes, talking with the same mouth. Our minds were once one. We looked at each other and laughed about jokes we didn’t even tell, holding the other in the pain we both could feel. We were one.
And when I lie awake in bed now, I want that back. I need that back. I want the inside jokes nobody else understands. I want your arms around me, when a black day is pulling me down. I want you next to me at night, when I can’t sleep.

I close my eyes and breathe deep. In and out. In and out. Again and again. I feel you so intense it hurts. I breathe and smell you. The smell of your skin, your hair, your face. I see your eyes on the inside of my lids. I look at them and feel safe. I fall into them and hope I’ll never find the end.
If I had any tears left, I would cry. But I’m so exhausted. I can’t cry anymore. I can just lie there, seeing, feeling you, embracing the pain in my whole body. The pain of you not being next to me. It creeps from my toes to the ends of my hair. I can’t take it anymore.

I open my eyes, ignoring the flames of pain getting bigger, because you’re really not there. I swing my legs out of the bed, waiting for the swirling in my head to go away and then I stand up. I go into the bathroom and open the shelf over the basin looking for some pills. I need to stop the pain. I just want to sleep. I just need some rest. I find the painkillers. Right next to them are some sleeping pills. I want to ignore them. I shouldn’t take them. I already took too many over the time. It is time to start learning to sleep without them again. But they are shouting my name. They’re screaming at me. “TAKE US!” Simple words again and again. And I’m too exhausted to ignore them. So I grab them too.

Back in the bedroom I sink into the huge armchair you always sat in, reading your fantasy-novels. I take a soft blanket to cover my shivering legs. On the windowsill stands a bottle of water. I take it and open it. Two bottles of pills in my hand I sit there mesmerized by the thought of sleep. I take some of the painkillers and swallow. I close my eyes and wait. Time is rushing by like a snail. Thoughts are swirling in stagnation. The pain refuses to leave. So I take more. Just stop pain. Go away. I need to sleep. I can’t do this anymore. But it stays. So I start with the sleeping pills. One after the other. I’m still awake. They don’t work. Please, let me sleep. I am so tired. More and more pills slide down my throat. And finally the world starts fading and I sleep, still feeling you at my side, taking my hand, guiding me home…