Sing Goodbye

(Rain falls outside on the balcony, the battered, whitewashed french doors open, the filmy curtains wafting gently in the draft. The room is dark, illumination coming from the gray day outside, ghosting everything in blues and grays. He sits on the floor, back against the wall, his knees drawn up and bare feet pale against the dark, grained floorboards. He is dressed in loose-fitting dark gray drawstring pants and a black shirt that is a size too large, the cut-out collar slipping over one shoulder as he leans his head back against the wall. His pale eyes stare at the ceiling, mapping the cracks in the plaster. His face is blank, almost slack, as if the life, the spark, has gone out of him, leaving him incapable of expression.)

I loved to hear her sing.

She wasn’t great at it. No, but the average person would call her good.

Still... to me, though, there was no voice I’d rather listen to. For me, she could sing for hours, and I had asked her to once. I’d lain with my head in her lap, listening, until her voice got hoarse and she asked me to sing for her instead. I only sang one song. She didn’t make me sing any more, as it was obvious to her I’d never really sung in my life.

She taught me to, though. She taught me to sing. I’m no wonder, but because of her, I can carry a tune. Because of her, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to sing again.

(He drops his head against his hand, scrubs his fingers through his hair, sticking it up in dark tufts. He taps his fingers against his lips, then looks sharply at his hand as if he has never seen it before.)

Huh. I didn’t realize I’d picked up that habit. It was something she’d always do, when she was thinking. She was always doing something with her hands, and I loved watching her mouth. She didn’t have the widest range of expression in the world. She didn’t look much different, in her face, when she was pissed off than when she was bored.

But she was always moving her mouth. Twisting it to the side, if she was facing some kind of tough problem. Pursing her lips when she was aggravated and trying not to say anything. And always chewing on her lower lip, or biting it, or running the tip of her tongue over it, whatever she was doing.

(He smiles, but it looks oddly disconnected from the rest of his face, like it doesn’t belong with those eyes, the slant of his brows.)

I really loved her mouth.

(He rubs his hand sideways over the lower half of his face, drags it down his neck.)

She was a difficult person. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean they’re perfect.

It’s not true, what they say, about love being blind. If anything, loving her made me see her all the more clearly. I wasn’t blind to her faults. I didn’t love her in spite of the flaws, or even because of them. I loved her, everything she was, good and bad and gray-shaded and all.

She didn’t have patience for people she didn’t hold in high esteem, and she could be very cutting when she chose to be.

She never liked me to compliment her. She could never really explain to me just why she saw herself so poorly, and while I’d like to think my love and adoration changed her self-image, that I made her see herself the way I saw her, I know it didn’t. There would always be a morning or two when I’d wake up to see her looking at me, this wistful, bewildered look on her face, and she’d ask me what on earth I was doing with a girl like her.

I used to get mad at her when she asked me that, or said she didn’t deserve me. Over time, I realized that was a broken part of her I’d never be able to fix, and though it rankled, I accepted it. After that, whenever she put herself down, or questioned how I could choose her, I’d just kiss her breathless.

(He snorts softly, a sound suggesting an aborted chuckle.)

She was weird. But I liked it.

She was a surprisingly foul-mouthed, violent girl, and she’d be the first to offer to kick somebody’s ass for you, so it always made me laugh, how she apologized so frantically if she accidentally hurt someone.

Her favorite movie was The Professional, she hated the color pink, and she’d always think up some excuse when she wore a skirt, as if she were afraid someone might accuse her of being feminine.

That was okay, though, because I liked the look of her ass in tight jeans. She always blushed and pretended not to hear me when I told her so.

(He pauses, his fingers steepling together in front of his mouth as his eyes land on a small velvet box on the wrought iron end table by the couch.)

She was supposed to come home. She was supposed to come straight home after work, like she promised. She was never supposed to stop by the store and pick up my favorite wine. She wasn’t supposed to take the interstate to try not to be late for dinner.

She wasn’t supposed to die in something as stupid as a car accident.

(He swallows thickly, banging his forehead against his knee and tipping his chin back to stare up at the ceiling again, and the tears slip from the corners of his eyes down into the hair at his temples.)

She always talked about, when she died, she was either going to be desperately old, or she would go out with a big bang. She’d die saving the world, or rescuing a kid from a burning building, or she’d be assassinated for pissing off the wrong people.

She was twenty-three.

She died in a car accident, because her crap car gave out in front of an SUV at eighty miles per hour.

Nothing even exploded. Just lots of flying metal; her seatbelt snapped her neck when the car flipped.

She must have been so pissed. I can almost imagine her cursing with her last breath.

(He bows his head and curls his arms around his legs, the sound of his strangled sob muffled by the cage of his body.)

I didn’t get to say goodbye.

I didn’t get to tell her one last time that I loved her.

I never got to give her the absurdly ornate ring I knew she’d hate, or switch it for the simple, elegant one I knew she’d love.

I didn’t get to ask her to spend the rest of her life with me, because her life didn’t last long enough for me to pose the question.

And I know, I know with every single cell in me that loved her, that she’d have said yes.

(Uncurling, he rubs almost angrily at the tears on his face with his fist. He rises, bracing one hand against the wall as if his knees might not hold up, and staggers over to the french doors, and out onto the balcony. He stands in the rain, leaning his hands on the rusted railing, his hair plastering to his head and cheeks, the rain rolling down the back of his neck and dripping off his nose. He is soaked to the skin in moments, but stares down at the empty street as if he doesn’t feel it.)

I sang at the funeral.

When it was my turn to stand in front of everyone and deliver a eulogy, a carefully scripted, trite speech meant to console the mourners and say nothing, I removed the mike from the stand, and gestured to the men I had hired. It took them a few minutes to set up the drums and tune the violin, and by the time the guitar was hooked up to the amp, people were muttering through their tears, wondering what I thought I was doing.

Her mother hadn’t much liked me anyways, so it was easy to ignore her shocked glare.

I didn’t care. This wasn’t for them; they didn’t matter.

I was singing for her.

It was hard. The hardest thing I’d ever done, and not because I had never sung for an audience. The only one I was singing for couldn’t even hear me, anyways.

My voice nearly broke, and I almost couldn’t sing around the sobs, but I got through it. For her, I sang, and I finished the song. And when it was done, I couldn’t stand from the crying.

No one applauded or cheered as I sobbed, on my knees, on that stage.

Her friends, though, the family that actually knew her, they contributed their voices to the silence, raising up the chorus of our song, thin and thready and hoarse from crying. My friends, the ones who’d met her, had seen how she completed me, had laughed with her, they joined in, and before I could pull myself together enough to focus on what I’d started, everyone who had come to grieve and pay tribute to the girl I loved was raising their voices in the song I had offered her.

There was so much power in that song. Not because of the lyrics, or the melody, which the band valiantly picked up again, but because of the feeling of it, and the power of human voices raised in concert to sing goodbye to my love.

(He lifts his head, raising his gaze to the sky, as if searching the gray clouds for his lover’s face. He blinks through the rain, and doesn’t find her, and drops his head in something akin to defeat, but which goes so much deeper, dragging a wrenching sigh, almost a despairing cry, from the depths of his soul.)

I miss her.

It hurts.

I love her.

And that hurts even worse.

But there’s a point, after love, after grief and loss, where you end up grateful to feel anything at all.

And if this mind-blowing ache is all I ever have left of her… I’ll take it.

I’ll take it all.