Not A Love Story

Trigger warning: suicide and suicide ideation.

I wish this was a love story.

If this was a love story, I would tell you of the day we met around that bonfire. I would speak of the judgments she suffered from my so-called friends of the time, and the retaliation we responded with, together, laughing at their collective ignorance.

I would tell you about the thousands of minuscule ways that Audrey brought me to life. I would tell you about the way her auburn eyes, when they captured the light just right, looked blood-red. I would tell you how once everything fell apart for me, this tiny scrap of a woman picked the pieces up, and, as though I were a 3-D jigsaw puzzle, put me back together upright.

I would talk about how much I loved her. I would talk about the time we went to the river sandbar in a friend's pick-up truck, because I didn't have a vehicle. I would tell you how we lay in the back, completely ignoring my friend and counting stars we could at times barely see.

I would tell you about how happy we were together.

I would tell you about how kissing her was like touching the sun, and how I never recovered being burned by her lips. I would speak of long summer days watching watermelon plants grow in the dry Texas heat.

I would even tell you about when we first made love.

But it's not a love story.

However much I wish to tell you one. It can't be, because I'm still here. The air that once kept her alive now refuses to let me die. The birds stab at me with their songs, drilling into my heart as they prick at the memories of my lost love.

Once upon a time, I reveled in the idea that I could lose someone. It's a childish dream, to have the lover who, in the earnestness of their love, can't help dying for you. But this wasn't true was it? I realized then what a mistake I had made too late. But the fake fingernails she used to hide her nail-biting habit proved how useless fantasies can be.

Thomas told me of her infidelity. An evening I'd spent away in the city, dancing in a night club, cost us both of our lives. It only took me so much longer to realize it. We'd fought, because of course we did. Nobody pisses you off like the person who brought you to life. When Thomas uttered the words of her infidelity, I was too eager to believe. I still remember when he took me to the bar, and bought me drinks, and confessed.

His words drove my heart. I saw him in that moment as a savior, as a prover of things that I could use, garnishments for battle. Finally I had the leverage to win an argument against the love of my life. I could finally call her a liar and prove it. Because of course, his words counted more than hers. And when she said no, all I heard was a lie, a misdirection.

She'd been lying. This came out later.

This is the thing that loses most people when I speak of her. There was no doubt at all in my mind that she'd cheated. The reason for that was simple: she told me so as well. She confessed second, and in that glorious moment, I actually scolded her for that. The idea is preposterous now, as I stand here, staring motionless into the rose bushes, weighing my future against my pass. It wasn't that she hadn't cheated-she had. But I'd given up on her long before that.

I'd stopped trusting her, stopped confiding in her, and every day she wanted more trust, more confidence. I wish I had a reason for that, but I don't. The best I could come up with is that she'd gotten that damned job at Brekker and Garfield legal practices. Here I was, just starting out a career in engineering and already being supplanted by artificial intelligence, when she attained her dream. How could I not be happy for her?

Now, I can't answer. At the time, I could have come up with a thousand responses, one for each time she worked late and left me to spend my paltry earnings at the bar, complaining with my friends about how I wouldn't get laid that night because my wife would be too tired.

Every night.

Except that last night.

She told me she was leaving, did you know that? I didn’t know what she meant. I didn’t know that our argument—the one that broke us—was the one that would do her in. I said “I don’t give a—”

You get it. And as she cried and left my presence, she looked back once. In that moment, the hallway light caught her eyes. The red seeped out of her and into the floor, the walls, all around me, and then into my heart. I followed up with how I wished I’d never met her. That’s when she fled from the volley of emotional arrows I'd heaved her way.

The next day, she cheated on me.

I thought that I was the victim. In hindsight, I’m not sure who was.

I truly wish a love story is what I could tell here instead of what happened next. I could tell about how when we woke in the mornings, sometimes, she would turn toward me and smile with that horrible morning breath and lay waste to any thought I had that I should be with anyone else.

Maybe it’s better that way.

Maybe I should tell the story that way instead.

But that’s not what happened. Above all things, I wish to be true, and the truth is simply that I loved her more than I knew. I loved her more than my life was worth. Even now, I barely speak anymore because…what’s the point of speaking when she’s not present to hear?

All that I can do for her, and all that I dared to do, was to bury her confidants in the weeds in the back yard of the house we never succeeded in making into a home. Confidants as in two: Thomas, whose body already decomposes among the rose garden, and the man who loves her, and whose entire world was crushed the day he crushed her.