The room smelled of raw cat piss and dirty dreams.
Some nightmares breathe and come to life. Some are measured in tons. Some make you corner yourself in a room with two flickering, dying light bulbs while the love of your life is in the bathroom pissing blood and crying that her life is changed forever.
At this point, memories you have never had put your brain in a vice.
At this point, the crying from behind a badly repainted wooden door gets louder.
That wooden door.
Badly painted on purpose. Simpler times when half unpacked boxes lay strewn into rooms labeled to make the future. The door was supposed to be light blue, adorned with grey clouds with bright silver linings on them. We put our handprints in the middle, mine in dark blue, hers in light green, and underneath, in script, was written “we will be our own silver lining.”
We had let the paint chip and wear. The silver lining, now only a darkened edge for the storm clouds that now dropped glass raindrops all over the hallway floor. The door, our dream, had unfurled months ago like the end of a silk ribbon and lifted high into the storm, disappearing into the void of an unforeseen future.
Fast forward to a present that tastes like sour milk and caustic catastrophe.
“Ethan! Please! I don’t want to do this anymore! Please!”
The tears choked the words lifeless. It’s too late for all that ugly talk now. The steps have already been taken and we both knew it.
A week from now the crimson stains on the inside of the toilet would be the remnants of could be happiness and would be dreams.
I was younger then, prettier.
She kicked the wall over and over bellowing a cessation of the blood.
“Please! We are killing her! Killing her! Oh God! Jesus please don’t hate me!”
We laid in bed and I ran little circles around her belly button. She held the most important piece of plastic of both of our lives in her hands, blazed pink with a huge plus sign. She turned it slowly over, and over again, almost as if the sign would change.
“I’m ready, Ethan. I am. This is what our future is. Right here. This little pink plus. Our new addition. Get it?”
“Hardy har har. ADDITION! WHEW! Comic genius!”
“Shut up assface!”
I leapt on to her sending the little plastic test spiraling in slow motion.
“I f*****g love you, know that?”
It fell further, gaining speed…
She smiled, the corners of her mouth crooking up and closing her eyes.
“This moment,” she started, “this is what they write about when they talk about love.”
I leaned in and put my lips to hers.
Ice cold.
The test hit the ground and shattered, spraying a mist of blood onto the hardwood floor and off white bed sheets.
“Ethan! It won’t stop! Please baby! Please!”
Corrosive, burning sweat fell from my face and into my eyes. I staggered to my feet and felt my way to the bathroom. Flames danced in the small apartment, the smoke choked me, head felt off and light, the walls pulsed with anger and pumped the room with hot air and fear.
“Winter.”
“Winter?”
“Yeah Winter.”
“It’s pretty, but why that?”
The day was bright. Low 80’s. We ate sushi in the outside patio of a Japanese American joint in lower Manhattan. She clicked the front of her shoe against the bottom of my foot playfully. Our Chihuahua lapped at a bowl of water that I kept dropping saki into and getting crooked looks from the locals. She didn’t mind though. She was good for a joke.
“Because,” I started, “ Winter is pure and open and focused. Breathing in the air of clarity and focus. Winter is romance and togetherness but can also be biting and bitter. She’s gonna get her beauty and bitterness from you and her clarity and biting wit from me.”
“Winter?”
“Winter.”
Her ice blue eyes tore into mine in only the way they could. One glance dissected my soul and stormed my heart. She pulled the straw to her lips and sipped.
“I love it,” she said, reaching under the table for my hand.
The dog licked our interlocked fingers and perfection had a painting of pure ease and godliness.
I finally got to the bathroom door, pressed my hand against it gently, matching mine with the chipped, green, painted version of hers.
“Be the silver lining.”
My head throbbed and tears began to pour out.
“Help me!”
I heard screaming. The walls rattled with demonic fury. Someone had woken the Kraken and he was caked in blood and terror. He was the created abomination of eons of aborted images of new beginnings. He was the black rider. This b*****d was the 5th horseman of the apocalypse.
My soul shuttered and locked, pulsating to the sound of a wall being kicked from behind a door where death stood, catching the hemorrhaging remains of our clarity, our biting beauty, our Winter.
“Help me!”
“Winter?”
“Winter.”
I pushed the door open and knelt down before her. Mascara made streaks of black and blue veins upon her face. Her hair, a matted mess from pulling it and her cheeks raw from scratching. She was pale, broken and her stained hands clutched the sides of the porcelain bowl. I laid my head against her lap and the sour tears burned holes in my face, dripping passed her legs and joined with what was left of our silver lining, which was now fuel for the sewage system where her future would be forgotten and dumped into the river miles away. The river of blood. The fallout would be biblical and a pestilence would rise, stinging us for our transgressions.
I rubbed her leg, she my head.
“….Baby,” she said, wiping the side of my face, relieving me of the twenty ton tears that sat upon my cheeks. “It’s over now, ok? Help me…back to..bed ok?”
I looked up at her. The vanity light behind her created a halo around her form. I looked up and saw her, and God behind her. My Galatea, My love.
I reached down and wiped away the murder from her legs.
I said I reached down and wiped away the last bit of murder from her legs.
Gently, I pulled her up and took her into the bedroom and laid her down on the cool pillows. The hate had lifted from the room and the sun shone down upon her, I grabbed a damp washcloth and wiped away the tears and bad decisions and regret from her face. Her breathing steadied and finally, mostly due to exhaustion and frustration and heart ache, finally slipped away into uninvaded sleep.
I combed her hair back with my fingers and kissed her twice on her forehead.
“This is our future.”
“Doctor, will there be any pain?”
The room was white, as usual, and smelled of cotton balls and antiseptic. He passed over three pills in an envelope and explained what the effects would be.
“This would cut off the blood flow….”
“This stops the growth….”
“This expels the waste…”
This expels the waste. What could one day rule the world is reduced to rubbish and refuse that would get wiped up with a paper towel and buried in a landfill.
There are no headstones for the forgotten, only memories in blood.
That night, some God spoke to me.
I walked to the gate amidst the clouds and was met by angels who cast sideways glances at me and stopped their songs of splendor. There, in the distance, a divine light holding within it a frosted white flower. I grabbed the bars of the gate and looked as the flower opened and within in, a sleeping child, 5 maybe 6 years old. She restlessly pushed her dirty blonde hair off her face. She had pink cheeks and high cheekbones like her mother. A rounded button nose like her father. She lightly blinked her eyes and opened them wide.
Ice Blue.
Like Winter.
The purist and calmest Winter, making way only for untouched snow and still heavy air.
She sat on a pedal and kicked her feet back and forth.
My eyes burned and horrible icy tears formed in the lids. I smiled an ugly half crying smile and pushed my hand through the bars in the gate and waved.
She scrunched her nose and lifted her tiny head and tilted it from side to side, and crooked the sides of her mouth up, like her mother.
The tears cut my face like razors and cold kissed the wounds.
She hopped down and walked toward me, giant silver lined wings sprouted from her back. She held out her hand and raced forward, but never got any closer. I felt heavy, pushing down through a nonexistent floor. I cried and bled, telling her to run faster. She stopped and frowned.
“No God..please..don’t,” I begged with the light. I scratched at my face and pulled hard on the gate, but moving it not.
The little girl’s bottom lip pushed out, quivered and pouted. In her eyes formed tears. In her perfect, blue eyes formed tiny red tears.
“God…no…no no no. Please.”
“Daddy?”
“No God. No.”
“Why can’t you hold my hand?”
I knife in my chest and screwed. God is making this personal. I'm the pin cushion. I acted like a jackal and he's treating me like one. I wept afresh. Searing pain scorched my face and my hand became of fire. I pulled on the perfect golden gates, harder and harder again. I bellowed and shook the sky. The devil had been awakened from his thousand year sleep. Torture had begun for the uninformed and the ones who made malicious mistakes.
“F**K! F**K F**K! YOU F**K!!”
The light sat silently behind the flower. Emotionless, unmoving and stoic. I would return here, every night until I died. And when I did finally take the big s**t I would fall from that gate, skin burning from bone, into the black nothing. I will fall knowing I deserve whatever I got, and welcomed it.
Icy tears will fall upward, and disappear into clarity.
And into Focus.
And into the heavy air.
And into Winter.
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