To Find Love In Bottles Of Cream Soda

To Find Love In Bottles Of Cream Soda.

By Jake Walters

I turned over to wrap my arms around him, but my hand fell to the sheets on the bed.

I opened my eyes to find that he wasn’t laying next to me. I pushed myself up and felt my muscles shake as I held myself up. I was still weak from yesterday’s workout at the gym. I looked at my clock. 5:42 AM.

I rubbed my eyes and sat up. It wasn’t normal for Jimmy to be out of bed 15 minutes early. I walked out of our room and into the kitchen. Maybe he had gotten up early, and was sitting at our table, drinking his coffee and reading the paper like he always is, every morning.

I always loved that about him.

He wasn’t at the kitchen table.

The air was very cold. Fall was just beginning. The leaves on our maple tree in the backyard had just started to turn a burnt kind of orange. This was his favorite time of year.

“Everything dies,” he once said to me. “But they die, only to come alive again.”

He was referring to Spring. He also loved Spring, but not nearly as much as he enjoyed fall. I guess he liked the excitement of waiting to see what kind of life that “death” would turn into. It was like his own kind of Christmas.

Thinking of this made me wonder if he was outside, sitting on the porch. Maybe with some coffee. After all, I had just looked, and the coffee had been made. He always makes 8 cups; we drink a lot of coffee. But there were only 6 in the kettle, according to the little numbered white lines.

So I walked back to our room to get my robe. It was too cold outside to go out there in just my boxers and my T-Shirt.

As soon as I entered, my alarm clock went off, startling me. 6:00 AM. Had it been 15 minutes already? I suppose time goes by faster when your mind is busy.

I walked over to it and turned it off. The silence returned. Only this time, it was a different kind of silence than before. It was that kind of silence that brings a sort of dread to the brain. The kind that makes your muscles tense, and the kind that dries your mouth out.

I put on my robe, and tied it nice and tight. If I was going outside, I wanted to lock in as much heat as possible.

I began to walk back out into the house. I tripped on one of Jimmy’s glass bottles. He loved Cream Soda. But he would only drink it out of glass bottles. And he liked the line them up on the floor in our hallway. He said that it looked “artistic.”

I never understood that, and I still don’t. But I loved him, so I just let him do it, because it made him happy. And anything that made him happy made me happy.

I bent over to put the bottle back into its place and continued my journey out to our back porch.

I slid open our sliding glass door, not noticing that it was unlocked. The cold bit at my skin with it’s microscopic, razor sharp teeth. A slight breeze brushed the hair off of my forehead. My eyes watered a bit as they adjusted to the drastic temperature change.

I shivered, and looked around. He wasn’t out here.

I started to get frustrated. Where the hell was he? I would have heard him rummaging around in our house. He wasn’t in the bathroom, I knew, because he always sang while he was in the bathroom, regardless of whether or not I was sleeping. He wasn’t in the kitchen, because I had already looked.

The only place I hadn’t checked was his studio.

Jimmy was a musician, you see. He played all sorts of instruments. Piano, guitar, clarinet, anything you could think of. He even wrote his own little tunes. I thought they were quite nice, even the ones he said he didn’t like.

But maybe I’m biased because I love him so much.

So, I walked back inside and closed the door.

I locked it.

I walked through the kitchen and noticed that another two cups of coffee had been poured out of the kettle. I was alarmed, and I grabbed one of the kitchen knives from out of its rack. I walked slowly down the hall, and into Jimmy’s studio.

There he was.

He just sat there. Cup of coffee in his right hand, and a gun in his other.

I had never seen the gun before.

“Jimmy, what are you doing?” I asked him, nervous.

“I love you, darling,” he replied.

And with that, he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

At first, I didn’t know what was happening.

The noise was so loud that my ears stopped hearing, and my eyes couldn’t focus. I tried to look at him, but he was just a blur of red.

It was a few seconds before I realized that I was kneeling on the ground. I felt a hot liquid touch my knee. I looked down to see that it was Jimmy’s coffee. His mug had fallen to the ground right next to his bare feet.

I looked up to see his face, but he had no face.

Well, he did. But it wasn’t HIS face. It was cold, empty, and deformed. His physical features were all intact, but everything that made him Jimmy was gone. I saw a single tear resting on his cheek bone. That was another thing I loved about him. His cheekbones were so defined, he could have pierced skin with them.

Then I noticed the blood spatter on the wall behind him, and his hand resting in his open mouth, clutching a gun.

I had never seen the gun before.

I looked at him for a long time, my mind trying to process it.

After several minutes, I had realized what had happened.

Jimmy had killed himself. Right in front of me.

He had been outside before I awoke.

He made coffee.

He was dead.
He was dead.

He was dead.

I let out only one cry of grief.

I unplugged my cell phone and called the police.

I’m not sure, I mean, I can’t quite remember what I said to them. I think I told them it was my fault. When they arrived, and they did some background checks, they reassured me that it wasn’t. Of course, I had to go through the strenuous interview process, since of course, I was a suspect.

But I was cleared.

Rightfully so.

I loved Jimmy more than anything.

I loved Jimmy like he loved the fall.

Like he loved to put his bottles in a row.

I’m going to be honest, it took me a very long time to get over the loss of my lover. When I returned from the memorial service, after receiving numerous dirty looks from Jimmy’s family members, who disapproved of his relationship with me, I took those glass bottles and I broke them. All but one. I kept one for myself. I nearly broke that one. But something stopped me. It was like that bottle was a piece of Jimmy. A piece of him that I’m sure I will never let go of.

I cleaned up my mess, and I put the remaining glass bottle next to our bed. I stared at it for nights on end, trying to figure out what it was that kept me from breaking it, as I did with all of the others, out of anger and sadness.

And that’s when it hit me.

As I looked at all of the pieces of broken glass on the floor, a thought crept into the back of my mind. Those pieces were like Jimmy. He was the broken remnants of a once solid, beautiful creation. He broke under the extreme pressures of his life; his disapproving family, his inability to make a career out of his art, and possibly even the stresses of being in a relationship.

But all those pieces were set free from their confinement. They conformed to the shape of the bottle, just so they could house something that people enjoy. For Jimmy, he was housing his beautiful personality, his beautiful gift of music, and his overall soul. I loved his soul so much, but I couldn’t keep it confined. I had no right to. Only he had the right to free himself, or to chose to stay in his vessel.

I wish he had chosen the latter.

But just like those broken pieces of glass, Jimmy was set free.

I cried so much that night. I heaved, and screamed, and all out sobbed my eyes out.

I don’t remember falling asleep.

But when I woke, I turned over to wrap my arms around him, but my arm fell to the sheets on the bed.

I opened my eyes and looked out my window. The last leaf had fallen off our maple tree.

It was 5:42 AM.

Maybe that means that Jimmy is alive again, somewhere else. Something else.

Some people call me crazy for believing that I can still find Jimmy’s love in that last bottle of cream soda. But I let them call me that. And I let them laugh. Because I know Jimmy would laugh if he heard me talking like this.

And he is laughing.

I know he is.

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