@lala

An elegy of love, grief, and the terrible endurance of memory. First-person perspective. A man mourning the woman he loved. ------------------------------------------------------------------- There is a particular cruelty in surviving the person you love. It is not the cruelty of death itself. Death, for all its mercilessness, is an honest creature. It arrives without apology, takes what it has come for, and leaves the living to quarrel with its absence. No, the cruelty lies in the morning after. And the morning after that. And all the wretched mornings that follow, when the sun, having witnessed your entire world collapse, still has the audacity to rise. I have come to despise the dawn. Once, I adored it. She had loved the early hours, you see. Loved them with an affection I could never understand, for I had always considered sleep a far more reasonable occupation than watching the sky change its colours. But she would wake before the servants, draw the curtains aside, and stand barefoot upon the cold floor, wrapped in one of my shirts. Sometimes, she would turn to find me watching. "Come," she would whisper, smiling as though she were sharing some magnificent secret. "Look at the sky." And I, being the sort of fool who believed he possessed an infinite number of mornings, would merely extend my hand towards her. "Come back to bed." She would laugh. How strange that I cannot remember the sound of my father's voice, nor the lullabies my mother sang, yet I can recall the exact manner in which her laughter would falter when she tried to suppress it. I remember how she would press her lips together, how her shoulders would tremble, how she would eventually surrender and laugh all the harder because she had failed. I remember these things. But I cannot remember the last time she laughed. That is the first betrayal of memory. It preserves what is useless and abandons what is sacred. I can tell you the colour of the ribbon she wore on the seventeenth day of spring, eleven years ago. I can tell you how many steps she took from the drawing room to the garden when she was angry with me. I can even tell you which of the silver spoons she disliked, because its handle bore a little bird whose beak she thought looked particularly unpleasant. Yet I cannot remember what she said to me on the last morning of her life. I have spent years trying. I have sat in the chair beside our window, closed my eyes, and forced myself through every miserable detail of that day. The rain had stopped before breakfast. There were three letters upon my desk. She had worn blue. Or perhaps it was white. I remember that she kissed my cheek as she passed, and that I had been occupied with some trivial matter, a letter from a man whose name I have since forgotten. Did I turn towards her? Did I smile? Did I tell her I loved her? I must have. Surely, I must have. But there is a difference between believing you were a loving man and remembering that you behaved as one. That difference has become the place where I spend most of my nights. I have wished, with a desperation bordering on madness, that we had quarrelled that morning. A terrible quarrel. One in which she might have thrown something at me, or called me an insufferable man, or declared she would never speak to me again. At least then I would remember her words. At least I would have something sharp enough to hold. Instead, I have a kiss upon the cheek, the ghost of a smile, and a door closing so quietly that I did not think to look up. There are men who lose their fortunes and recover them. There are kings who lose kingdoms and raise armies to reclaim them. There are those who have buried their children and somehow found the courage to put another foot before the other. I have always admired such people. I do not understand them. For I have lost one woman, and all the splendours of the earth have become poor things in comparison.