Pieces

[iii]

She hands him the printouts. Her diary, he thinks. She doesn’t look up. He’s flipping through and there are rows and rows of the same line, dashed under different dates. Pre-him dates, post-him dates. I will get better, I can do it.

I will get better, I can do it.

I will get better, I can do it.

He cries and the tears drip onto paper. They merge and blur, twist and turn, until they’ve become part of the ink. He doesn’t look up.

[ii]

There was a constant need to throw up, a feeling of too much.

Run. She was running so fast that the wind disappeared behind her, her tears bursting into the cold air. So fast that the night expanded into a terrifying expanse of color, the whole earth spinning underneath her, sliding backwards and backwards.

A blanket of moonlight drowned her into sleep.

She woke up screaming, her mouth gaped open, silence tearing her throat raw. There were fingernail marks on her arm from where she tried to run, little crescents that shrunk backwards into the dark. Her feet hid under the threads of red socks, under the smell of bacon drifting up the stairs, the heaviness she slipped under.

“Good morning,” Cameron was saying as she moved down the stairs, his eyebrows knit in concentration as he flipped over a slice of bacon, the pot sizzling in greeting.

She pushed a smile onto her face, shoving the silence from her throat with a cough. In her world, there was nothing that could escape the clutches of a lie, and yet here she was once again, pushing herself up and up through the weight, as if maybe in the next second the hallowed edges of her face would peek through at the top.

“Why are you making bacon? Don’t you have to go to work?” The sound of her voice burst at the peaks. It didn’t seem too dissimilar from the cries of the bacon lying prone in the pot.

“I took the day off. I had some chores to do, and I thought I’d surprise you,” he shrugged. “I made breakfast the way we used to,” he smiled, handing her an egg sandwich. She stared at the bacon nestled in between, little beads of fat glistening, beady glinting eyes that stared back unflinchingly. “Just feeling nostalgic.” He kissed her gently on the cheek and her heart swelled with a familiar feeling but her bones shivered with the nightmare burning under her skin.

Cameron’s eyes were hazel under the scattering of morning sun. She would always remember the hazel cutting through the air. She would remember the way they glinted with affection in the early days of their relationship and she would remember how they looked saying goodbye.

[i]

“Are you coming to the company party?” Lucille has her phone tucked in the crook of her shoulder. It occurs to him that she might be talking to someone on the phone, but her eyes are on him. Her eyes are so dark it almost hurts to hold her gaze, so he glances downwards at her desk. For a brief second, he’s caught up in a trance as her hands efficiently fold the contents of her desk into her bag.

“Yes,” he answers. Lucille smiles at him and it cuts through the angles on her face; how ironic for it to take sharpness to dull sharpness and soften the edges of her cheeks. She’s beautiful. Somewhere inside him the thought registers like a burst of fireworks.

“I’ll see you there,” Lucille flips her coat on in one smooth motion.

“See you, Lucille,” he watches her pick her bag up. Her name rolls off his tongue. It’s both natural and unnatural and he has a sudden flash of her in sunnier weather, perched at the edge of an ocean cliff, short dark hair swirling in the breeze, and then it’s gone the way it came. He thinks maybe he could fall in love with her. He thinks maybe he had a vision of the future. He thinks he might offer to pick her up on the way to the company dinner. And then she’s on the phone on the way out, saying words like “be there soon” and “of course” and the words slither back down his throat.

[ii]

Exhaustion was the absence of color when she closed her eyes and tried to think of paradise. The blues of her eyelids hurt like she had been staring at the sun for years. She looked upwards, tilting her head up so that the tears fell back through her eyes, slipping down her throat. Outside, the streets bumped into each other, losing edges, a wash of blankness.

He was never a great driver, so the car jerked and skidded through a familiar intersection, the garden coming into view. It was both her solace and her pain, the way blossoms pushed back through soil, beckoning for her to do the same. There were white petals in her eyes and tears hanging from the trees, swaying in the breeze, and the garden was so beautiful that it only reminded her of darkness and light and color so brilliant that it bled her dry.

She lifted a hand to her face, almost certain it would come away wet with tears, but the pale fingers drooped in her lap were dry, brittle. There was no trace of her heart bleeding. He was rolling the windows down, turning the radio up.

It’s all in your head. She had been telling herself this for too long, so long that it no longer stung under her collar, just pounded in a residual ache, a familiar touch. A vine was growing farther and farther downwards, curling at the base of her stomach. It’s all in your head, the roots wailed, digging into cracks and edges with little sharp fingers.

And I’m bleeding dry, I’m bleeding dry for you, the radio sang. She stared at her reflection in the mirror. The garden disappeared out of sight. Her toes curled in her red socks, her hands pressed against the seat, the little crescent marks pulsing under her sleeves. Out of the corner she could see the edges of Cameron’s face. The car was splitting in half, hers crumpling out of control, his sailing away. She thought she could see him, miles ahead, face turned back towards her, but there was only darkness and the imprints of white petals burning through her mind.

[iii]

In her dreams she sees peach trees and orchards. There is no such thing as weight and she flies high above treetops and chimneys and toddlers stretching their hands up towards smiling faces.
In her dreams there are no nightmares, no tears. In her dreams she wakes and moves and loves and cries and dances and everything until it is so much she cannot help but smile.
The way he’s staring at her should break her heart but perhaps it’s all a dream, even the silky feel of paper under the pads of her thumbs. One of her hands lift and wipe away his tears.

[i]

Lucille’s last name is Lewis. She likes the color silver, but it came at a close second to green. She thinks green is relaxing. She tries to convince him that it’s the color of everything good in the world, like recycling and springtime and GO at traffic lights. She likes peaches and watermelon ground up into glasses of summer.
Lucille pulls on the edges of her sleeves when she’s embarrassed and bobs her head when she’s excited. She takes the lemon off the edge of her cocktails and deposits them in the trash can without hesitation.

She wanted to be a poet when she was younger, but, as it goes, “life got in the way.” She ducks her head. She laments the fact she never had one great dream, she gets drunk and she cries on his shoulder while he awkwardly pats her back, trying not to think about the way his palm fit between her shoulder blades.

He stays sober. He thinks about how she had looked at him at the office. The company party is dying down and she’s looking up at him and it still hurts to look into her eyes. Once again he finds himself thinking that he could fall in love with her. He thinks about driving her home but it feels like stepping over lines he didn’t prepare himself for. Her sister comes to pick her up.

[ii]

She remembered how the explosion felt, how it had blown everything apart for days and weeks and months on end. The scattered particles, the rays of debris in the sky that cracked the night into pieces, the heavy smoke that burst through color. The smell of confusion that burned dully under the pain. How could she have forgotten the eerie cries, the ones that sounded in silence, eating their way inwards instead of outwards?

And then, perhaps more hauntingly, the aching silence, the heavy weight of a smile melting down her face. The way the corners went first, sliding down her chin. The piercing blue of sunny days. The smooth unfamiliarity of her face in the mirror. The trained laughter that scarfed down her wails.

She does the house chores like they hold the last importance of her world. Her fingers stung from scrubbing every possible surface, echoing a low hum in the pit of her stomach. She wanted to drown herself in the roar of the vacuum cleaner. Something was eating her alive and she thought maybe for a second that if she cleaned, she could protect Cameron, she could give him something in return for the love that no longer seemed to exist inside her.

When Cameron came home she was afraid to meet his eyes. His eyes were so hazel, so clear, it hurt to feel their gaze on her crawling skin. There was a hand holding his hand, the traitorous hand that betrayed the thunder inside her. Maybe Cameron would feel it too, would see how she was drowning, would hold her hand tighter and pull her free of the quicksand. She thought, maybe that was the only way she could love. She never wanted to see him again and yet she couldn’t bear for him to leave.

She kissed him as if she were trying to trade souls. It occurred to her only minutes later that her yearning to transfer the darkness to him eroded at everything she had left inside her, and she no longer wanted to touch him at all.

[i]

“Are you free tonight?” Lucille says. Her hair is long and the dark wisps wave at him from under the folds of her scarf. He pauses, mid-word, fingers hovering above the keyboard. He watches her as she puts things in her bag, one pen at a time, carefully nudging her notebooks into place. Her eyes are square on him and he vaguely remembers a time he was too afraid to hold her stare.
They watch a movie a couple blocks down from the office. They are not dating, she maintains, but she ducks her head. She buys him popcorn and drinks from his soda and when the couple on screen kiss she blushes.
When he looks at her, his world goes calm. He learns for the first time what being present might be like. It is enough, just the smile on her face and the warmth of her cheek against his chest as they hug in doorways. There is something simple about being with Lucille. Something that takes away his words and he’s a little scared that he might really, really, fall in love with her this time.
She doesn’t go home.

He falls.

[ii]

A residual ache thrummed under her palms as she pushed down on the wrinkled bus seat, her pulse thumping towards the ground, towards safety.

It’s impossible to forget being trapped, laying underneath something so heavy that in the dark, she could close her eyes and feel as if she were nothing, as if she had broken into a million fragments. Impossible to erase the snap of the curtains and the cold air bubbling in, freezing the shiny trails down her cheeks, watching the pictures on her nightstand tumble to the floor.

The bus stops, her feet walk her down the steps. The gravel crunches and shivers underneath her weight. She thinks that if she squints, she can maybe see the end. As if she can blink away the curtains and the walls, blink away the vines growing inside her.

If she closes her eyes, she can see the curtains on her window fluttering, feel the snowflakes on her cheeks, the ice bundling around her. Even explosions were no match for the ice. The ice ate everything in its path, swallowing without teeth, without digesting, just numbing.

Her phone opens under the brush of her fingers.

Day seventy, she types. 11:47am.

Somewhere in the back of her mind she remembers the numbers, how she had hated them. How they’d stayed straight and strong even in the explosions, how they’d laughed and taunted her as she tried to run, how they’d crept down her throat with their dirty little feet, casting shadows and doubt.

I think I’m going to the library. The words appear at her command.

She deletes everything. She hasn’t been to the library in a long time.

[i]

Lucille doesn’t remember this. He has a memory of her sitting on the library steps, smiling up at him.

He’s a financial analyst, numbers run through his blood as if he could inhale the sharp edges and angled curves. In college, there was a cold bitter edge to him that kept him confined within the safety of equations and graphs.

“Cameron,” he remembers his art professor saying, “you need to feel it. When I ask you what you think about your concept, I’m asking for the ‘think’ that comes from the heart.” He never understood the purpose of requiring some sort of art class to complete the major. Why would they look for well roundedness when reality is full of pointy corners and slotted edges? He had seen his family fall apart under the constraints of edges and remembers his resolve to become as bitter and cold as the world he had known.

Lucille, sitting on the library steps, smiling up at him. It occurs to him, looking down into her dark eyes, that he cannot describe her in any way meaningful except in the memories and the images stamped under the back of his eyelids. It seems far away, the safety and weightedness of numbers. Lucille is everything that he is afraid of and everything he never had.

He remembers thinking he could fall in love with this girl, before he even knew what love was like. There are thoughts streaming from his heart—perhaps this is what his professor meant—and he stutters, taking her hands, not knowing how else he can translate.

[iii]

A photograph, a movie ticket stub. A mangled teddy bear their friend’s dog chewed up. Ribbons of sticky notes. A tarnished keychain ring, three old pens, a piece of seaglass the color of dusk. In a box. No lid heavy enough to break through fragments of yesterdays.
She is handing everything to him and for a second they are connected, their palms clasped around the edges of the box. She is saying something but the whir of his heart is too loud.

[i]

It turns out, it is very simple. One second he was pre-Lucille-Cameron and then he was utterly-in-love-Cameron. He falls in love and it’s not a smooth tumble downwards but he does it anyways, because he can’t think of what it might be like to wake up without her.
There are sunny day Lucilles like the ones he had envisioned. Lucille at the ice cream parlor, staring at the drips of chocolate running down the hand, rolling her eyes, dark hair piling on the table as she reaches to hand him a napkin. Lucille filling out tax statements at the kitchen counter, kissing him on the cheek when she thinks he’s fallen asleep tilted on his side staring into space. Lucille who stands at the top of the playground slide giggling, the trail ends of her orange scarf bursting under the cast of the sunset.
And then there is the Lucille who shifts underneath and wisps in and out of being, the Lucille who pulls away fractionally, the Lucille who he wants desperately to love but how can he? How can he when Lucille herself is dancing far too fast for him to ever keep up with?

[ii]

She nearly slipped on a patch of ice. The world was a blank page. In time she learned to follow her feet, to let them take her wherever, as if her primitive instincts might have been the only thing stopping her from walking into and through the horizon. In the shadows of corners memories bubbled up and trickled down the hospital walls, little candies left out under sunlight. How many times had she combed through the past, looking for the beginning?

Cameron, smiling from underneath a fringe of bangs. The crinkle in his eyes. The expression on his face when she said goodbye that first fight, the way the outlines of his face blurred away.

Her mother, just another cold tombstone. Childbirth, they said, is where life and death sometimes get blurred. For her mother, the lines had been drawn the wrong way.

She was afraid of sleep, of waking up, of breaking down, of the cold, the fire, of the beautiful, the vivacious. Afraid of being left behind, being too grounded, not being grounded at all. She was afraid of the scars, afraid of the blankness, the colors, the lies. She had been trying her best, but she was still terrified as if she was clinging to too many threads and falling through too many galaxies.
“I can’t sleep,” she confessed. “I’m walking in fog all the time. What’s mine doesn’t feel like mine anymore.”
“Everything is too much.”
“I want to cry all the time.”
“Nobody notices.”
“Am I invisible?”
Her words were too much for her to bear. She came away with pills and prescriptions and meetings and the labels slapped to her forehead, the psychiatrist’s kind words beating under the eaves of her heart. She thought of the parts of her heart and wondered if the good doctor’s promises to heal her will travel up and down her aorta and through her ventricles.

Her feet carried her away. A single breath of air, floating aimlessly down her throat. A goodbye on the tip of her tongue. She thought she could see Cameron in the edges of her mind and it broke her heart but maybe her heart was meant to be broken one last time before it could heal.

[i]

Silence is the word he attributes to her red socks, she’s so quiet as she floats down the stairs. He ponders the fact that she has expanded to lighter than a feather and the wispy way her outline seems to shift. On one hand there’s the smell of bacon right before him and on the other there’s the almost unbearable feeling in his chest that he’s suffocating her.
“Good morning,” he says to her. He thinks that maybe he can ground her, can stitch his voice through her bones and anchor it all to the slatted floors. Lucille, he wants to say, but it seems to heavy for the precious weight of her frame. He didn’t think it was possible for her eyes to get darker but they were darker than they’d ever been and he resists the urge to wrap her into his arms because it occurs to him that she might break to pieces.

“Why are you making bacon? Don’t you have to go to work?” The sound of her voice rings in the morning air and bursts melodiously over the cries of the bacon lying prone in the pot.

“I took the day off. I had some chores to do, and I thought I’d surprise you,” he shrugs. “I made breakfast the way we used to,” he smiles, handing her an egg sandwich. He remembers similar mornings, making sandwiches in the early breaking of morning, the way their hips sometimes brushed together at the kitchen counter. “Just feeling nostalgic.”

He kisses her cheek. It is warm and smooth and molded to his touch the way they fit together seamlessly and he sees all of her, multicolored and layered within the sharpening edges of her outline.

Lucille’s eyes are nearly coal in the shadows his frame cast over hers. He remembers the darkness glinting like light. He remembers the way they looked at him, bursting to the edges, and remembers the color of tears cast over as she said goodbye.

It is the first and only breakup that matters.

[iii]

It occurs to him that maybe if his heart could break for hers to heal, then it was worth it. But still.

[iii]

It occurs to her that maybe if his heart had to break for hers to heal, then there can be no tomorrow that doesn’t grow from the straggling valleys of scar. But still.

[ii 1/2]

Tell me about Cameron.
- I don’t know how to describe him. I remember telling him we were not dating but I couldn’t help it, I just wanted to bask in his presence all the time. In the beginning it was not so bad, in the beginning—in the beginning it was like a summer drizzle.”
Your relationship was like a summer drizzle?
- I was a summer drizzle. I was sinking in quicksand but it was slow at first, I didn’t notice, and I thought there might be something wrong but then I met him. I thought, however momentarily, that it might cure me. Not him, but me with him. Lucille who knew and loved Cameron was the patch of clear sky.
- And then it all went wrong in the way that a summer drizzle might become a thunderstorm. And I had to let him go because I could see it going downhill in a way I couldn’t see out of my own suffering.
Would you like to find him after all this?
- I don’t know if I deserve it. Can I say yes?
- Can we not talk about this?
There is no place safe enough for her to think of him yet. There is no place wide enough for her to escape the shadows of guilt that accompany her every yearning.

[iii]

Life post Lucille: Okay, he guesses. He doesn’t fill in blank spaces. There is only moving forwards. He goes to work, a sniffly middle aged man has taken over her old job. He goes to work and he comes home and he meets friends on the weekends.

He runs into his art professor. He feels like the world has come alive since Lucille and there are little sticky threads of emotions that breach like waves against his chest. He goes on a blind date. He goes on another blind date. He’s happy in that way that simultaneously pulls you apart and puts you together. He doesn’t look for her. He thinks that maybe these are the last things he can do for her.

Sometimes, when the sky hovers halfway between daytime and night, he is stuck in a time that moves in circles such that he doesn’t even know which way is forward and over and over again he falls in love with her. Only at these times does he wish fervently, silently, for her to come back.

[iv]

There’s a man with his feet buried into sand at the bottom of the cliff, wispy hair billowing over hazel eyes. He’s staring at something, his chin tilted up towards the edges of the sky and if you look carefully, there’s a woman perched where the cliff meets the sky, short dark hair swirling, half hidden against silhouettes. You might be hallucinating. You might be dreaming. You might rub your eyes and blink twice. You swear that they’re somehow holding hands.