Page 14 of As the Rain Falls
Oh, God.
Loving will cut you deep, especially if it goes wrong.It will spill everywhere: the carpet, the floor, and the bed where she used to lie. And the more you press your hands over the wound, the more blood comes out. It leads to excruciating pain that makes you wish you could faint right on the spot.The bleeding stops eventually, but you have to be very careful, very gentle with the wound, because that’s where your limb used to be a long time ago.
Please, kill me.
Please, just take me instead.
Please, don’t leave me all alone with these people who don’t know me.
Please, you’re the only person I know.
Please, you’re my blood.
Please, I’ll do better.
I’ll be kinder.
I’ll learn to be nicer.
You can teach me because I want to learn now.
Please, I don’t want to do this.
I don’t want to be alone.
And the worst thing is, you’re always going to forget about your thumb no longer being there.You’re going to reach for the phone and realize you can’t grab it the way you used to.You’re going to try to move and stay stuck thinking about your limb, your limb, your limb, and the horror fades into some kind of sick numbness once you remember that you’re alive while she is forever stuck at the age of seventeen because that’s how far she gets to go.
And yet, you?
Oh, you’re alive.
You’re all bones and muscles, and your heart is beating in your chest. You still have other limbs that make you whole. Youstill have places to be at a certain time, and people to meet, and money to make.
Good things will happen to you, bad things will probably follow, but that’s never really the problem. The real problem is how the world won’t stop spinning, and neither will you.
It will just keep going.
Again, and again, and again, until you learn how not to open the wound and how not to use the missing thumb.
I am becoming somebody else, someone with a lost limb.I might have a different mind, but I’m not immune to any of the absurdities of life, am I? In the end my differences aren’t making me any less of a human being.
A thought comes to mind.
You’re not making a lot of sense, Beckett.
When was the last time that you slept?
It’s midnight now.
October 16th.
“Happy birthday, Lou.”
She doesn’t answer back.
I blow out the candles, pressing my hands against my chest to get them to stop shaking. It gets worse when I get sad—the shaking—and there’s nothing and there’s nothing to hold onto now that she is gone. I’m completely alone in this house, and everything is tainted because Lucia is dead.
The thought becomes louder little by little, and I start…
