Anthem for a Lost Cause

           She tore the pages out. She tried to cross through the words and even covered them in black paint, but she knew underneath, the words were still there, mocking her. He had told her what she didn’t want to know, what she already knew but was too scared to admit, and once she did it scared her even more.

           It had been coming for a while. She could feel it, a creeping sense of foreboding. It had started as a trickle that left unchecked became a tidal wave of emotion, an abandonment of reason, a loss of loyalty, and a betrayal of the self. It was like swimming against a tsunami. The harder she swam, the stronger it pulled her under.

She hated the desperation he caused, allowing it to capture and hold her prisoner, but it was desperation that kept her alive. There was pleasure in the pain, or perhaps it was pain in the pleasure, that she believed would always comfort her. As long as she had that, she had feeling.

He was killing her, but there was something liberating in that death. She realized how flawed humans are to desire just a brief moment of perfection; to desire what didn’t exist. She found the thought beautiful and disturbing.

She blamed it on the Romantics. Byron for his glorious melancholy, Shelley for his raging passions, and Keats for dying too young, just like Richey. It was at that moment she realized it wasn’t her missing him as much as it was he missing from her.

Richey was an enigma born a hundred years too late. She knew from that day in the Central Library, as he sat at the corner table in the company of Dylan, Camus, and Larkin, reading and scribbling in a notebook that he was an old soul. His inky black hair and dark eyes evoked the image of a Dickensian orphan. She approached him, asking if she could help him find any more books. He smiled and read her nametag.

“Awena,” he said in a voice she could never imagine being angry or cruel. “It means muse.” 

She felt her face grow warm under the glow of a blush.

“I’m running out of fantasy Awena, and here you are.”

“Pardon?”

He smiled. “That’s rather melodramatic, isn’t it? I read too much. My words aren’t my own. I’m completely ridiculous.” He said laughing at himself.

He waited for her after the library closed. They walked to Mario’s and sat on the small terrace sharing a bottle of house red and a piece of tiramisu. He told her he was a writer of poems but didn’t consider himself a poet. She asked him what he did consider himself.

He shrugged. “An anthem for a lost cause.” He said.

She awoke at 4:00 a.m., the time when everything is silent, and everyone, including Richey, was asleep. She laid alone in the darkness thinking about him, in his own bed, his boyish face cradled against the pillow, oblivious that she was thinking of him, especially the way he had looked at her. His dark eyes were touched with melancholy as though they had been witness to all of man’s tragedies and all of woman’s sorrows; a reflection of the tortured soul within. She found herself overcome by a sensation she wouldn’t comprehend until he was gone. It was the overwhelming feeling of wanting to protect him. She didn’t know it would be from himself.

She didn’t know about the sleepless nights. The nights he fought to vanquish his anxieties until the vodka-fueled melancholy finally overtook him and he passed into a dreamless sleep. His dark beauty and genius imposed themselves with such force she had no choice but to accept them, even when his head lay on the table between the empty bottles and illegibly scribbled pages.

           There were times when he was sublime. The evenings sitting on the hill wrapped together in a blanket under lavender water-colored skies, watching the cars on the bridge below. The lavender sky pooled into shades of violet and indigo until all that remained were the headlights from the cars below, drifting like phantoms through the darkness. Some nights he would light candles, read her Rousseau, and whisper poems in her ear. Others, they sat for hours without words passing between them.

           Then, came the night when he wondered aloud what it would be like to jump from the bridge into the river below.

           “It’d be romantic,” he said.

           “There’s nothing romantic about death,” she told him.

           Death broke the promise of being together forever.

           Then came the morning she awoke in an empty bed. The pillow next to hers, was vacant and cold. A single strand of dark hair was the only indication that Richey’s head had been on it only a few hours earlier. He had left everything behind, except his car, which was later found parked next to the bridge.

           Every day, she went back to their spot on the hill above the bridge with Richey’s journal, reading, and re-reading, looking for any hint of what happened to him. Richey completed her; now all she had left were some of the parts.

           Richey would have been thirty today. She had bought him a new journal and a fountain pen the day before he disappeared. She flipped through the blank pages imagining the magnificent words he’d fill it with; now those pages would remain empty, just like her. Richey had been her poem; now he would become her obituary.

           “It’d be romantic,” he had said. She decided to find out. She took the journal and headed down the hill towards the bridge.

           She stood on the edge of the iron grate, looking down at the river as it raged underneath her, aloof and unsympathetic to her anguish. She shuddered as the wind rolled around her, catching her hair and stinging her face. One step and it’d be over. One step would put an end to the suffering. One step and she’d be with him again.

She heard his voice in her head. “Awena, it means muse.”  

She flung the journal into the water, watching it waft on the tide before it disappeared underneath the unpromising surface. She was determined to follow it.

Richey told her he was “running out of fantasy,” and she had been his muse, she had saved him, even if it was only temporary. It didn’t make sense that she had saved him only to destroy herself. Richey had given her a purpose. She hadn’t realized how meaningless her life had been until she met him. Maybe, he had saved her. To take that one step now would defile his humanity. Instead of being the one who had saved her, he’d be remembered as the one who had made her jump.

           She took the one step. The one that led away from the bridge and to home. She regretted throwing his journal into the river; it had been a rash decision. But no matter, she had memorized most of it. She would go home and take out the journal she would have given him today. She would start on a fresh page. She would write what she remembered, adding her own stories and poems to it. It would be her way of “talking” to him. The journal would keep them together, and she vowed to carry it wherever she went.

           She had saved the strand of hair she had found on his pillow, in an envelope. She decided to tuck it into the pocket of the journal, rather than keep it hidden away in a drawer.

Richey had told her he was an “anthem for a lost cause.” He couldn’t have been more wrong.