Counting to Forget

Everything is dark dark dark as the middle of the night or the bottom of the ocean or the ever-expanding universe high up above. Everything is dark as her eyes.

He sits in silence on the cold, dew-wet grass, looking up and trying to count all the stars in the sky even though he knows that that is something he will never accomplish. No one will.

The stars are like her, he thinks; they’re beautiful and untouchable and just out of reach no matter how hard you try to reach them, exactly like she is.

All around him there is nothing. Not a soul. The only thing he can hear is the sound of the breeze that blows through the leaves of the hanging willow by the river and the soul of the river itself as its gentle waves crash into the stone-walls that cage them.
He enjoys the sound of solitude in the nightly hours; it’s the only time when he really ever feels at peace any more.

Someone walks across the silhouetted bridge, a shadow in the night that quickly makes its way over the river and continues into the labyrinth that is the city at night (or even at day - but now is not day, so that is completely irrelevant, he thinks). He pities the soul headed into the concrete jungle – the faux friends and faux furs and high fashion and the parties and drugs to which he expect the shadow is heading was never his kind of thing. “Silence is golden; speech is silver” is one of the most sensible things ever said, and he admires the person who said it first, for it is one of the truest things he has ever heard.

“One-thousand-three-hundred-and-four” he says aloud as he tears his eyes from the sky. It’s far from his record of two-thousand-four-hundred-and-seven stars counted, but it’s more than he’s seen all-together in the last month or so though, the sky has been black ever the day that she left him.

It was cold that day, and snowy. Winter wasn’t quite over and spring hadn’t yet begun, but their love had come to an end, she said.

“It’s not you, darling, it’s me,” she started, and he already knew what was coming. “But I don’t feel the way I used to any more, things have changed.” Her words were like knifes stabbed through his very soul and he looked into her obsidian eyes.

“If you don’t love me any longer, how is that not me?” he asked her, and she had no answer. She had no answer, then she kissed his cheek and walked away.

He never got a reason, and he had no hopes of finding out by himself why she changed, so when a week had gone and she still hadn’t even looked his way he just gave up.
She had been his everything, and now he was nothing to her. The darkness is overwhelming when your only light is blown out by time and you don’t have another match, that’s something he’s experienced first hand and that he will avoid again at all costs.

A familiar smell drifts by, carried on the wind. He can’t quite place it, but once he senses it a sense of longing and desperations sinks in on him and he wants to scream so loud that everyone on the whole planet can hear him, but he won’t do that. That would be the same as admitting defeat, and he is undefeatable.

Soft steps make a shallow sound in behind him as someone approaches, but he never turns around. Whatever it is he doesn’t care, it’s not her – that’s what the scent reminds him of. It smells the same as she did. It’s her scent. He feels a hand on his shoulder and leans a little further back and tilts his head up to look at the person standing above him, and his heart leaps when he sees her.

She sits down next to him and sighs, putting her small hand over his.

“I miss you,” she says. It feels like a string tightens around his heart and he finds it hard to breath for a second.

“Why?” he asks her. Why are you here now? Why did you leave me? Why do you miss me? So many questions run through his mind, all compiled into one little, three-letter word.

“It’s not the same when I’m not with you,” she smiles weakly, pathetically he finds himself thinking. “I don’t think I love you now either, but I miss you. I needed to see you, to be with you. Would you kiss me if I asked you to?” She closes her eyes and pouts ever-so-slightly, waiting for a response.

“I can’t do that,” he says, combating his feelings and the urges to put his arms around her and pull her closer and hold her and mark her as his. “You’re not really here, I won’t let you do this to me.”

The girl fades away until every last bit of her has become part of the darkness around him, and he kisses the back of his hand where hers lay just because.

Ever since she left him this has happened regularly. Ever since she left him he’s been stuck, his life is a car-crash waiting to happen – his car only feet from the cliff that will be the end of him.

Lying down on his back he closes his eyes and pictures himself standing on the rail of a tall, tall bridge. He is facing her, his back towards the black abyss the he so easily could fall into, and he smiles. Then he leans back and lets himself fall, an nothing has ever felt so good as when he sees her reach her hand out to catch his just a second to late and the look of despair on her face.

Open eyes again without sitting up he starts searching the sky again.

“One,” he whispers into the night. “Two… Three, four, five…” and he counts the stars again, trying to keep his mind away from the only one that made him think that maybe he could one day reach them.

His only light in the dark is that some day the memory that is her will fade, and the darkness it emits will disappear and once again.

His only light in the dark is forgetting, and there are still many stars to count.