Wuthering Heights

My eyes flutter open in the dark.  Please.  Please let it be a decent hour.  But no, it's 3 a.m.  Great.  I can lay awake for a couple of hours and just as I feel like falling asleep again, it will be time to get up.


And so, the Summer of Loss and Lamentation continues.  

Heathcliffe, they're all watching me.  Still.  But they don't watch here.  Not with any regularity anyway.  Here is where the prisoner can walk the grounds unencumbered by watchful guards and shackles.  Here is where it can all be poured out.  But there's not much to pour.  

He said 'sorry was not the feeling he got from me'.  No, that doesn't surprise me.  I'm surprised that he got any feeling at all.  I'm amazingly flat line these days.  The amazing and sorrowing things I hear about him register barely a blip on the roller coaster I used to ride.  My daily dose has seen to that.  

Well?  What was I do to?  That Morning came, the one where I couldn't get out of the bed, the one where I began to consider other ways to stop the empty sadness.  I saw it coming from a mile away, like a rogue wave rolling in and I couldn't stop it.  But I've been there before and I could not go there again.  It's not all about me, anymore.  I've got too many people depending on me, too much to lose.  I had to keep walking; I had to.  And so I did something about it.  And the saving was my undoing.


Somehow, he comes up in conversation at least once a day.  And why not?  We are in familiar places,  oft-traversed now-haunted places, we talk of shows past, of funnies of old, of the old one who liked us or at least tolerated us.  And their eyes flick to me.  They watch for the Wince and they get it.  Like a nervous tic.  Or the Brave Lookaway.  I look away from the conversation and try to drag my brain with it.  Otherwise, I start thinking about those times, and fall silent, pondering, my thoughts rolling downhill.  I try to remember promises I made, where it began to go wrong.  But I, who can't find the checkbook, the keys, my phone, can't or won't remember what I've broken.


They watch and they're glad.  You know they are.  Good riddance to bad rubbish is what they're thinking.  They think I'm better off.  They tell me I am.  Am I?  I must be.

One jangled her new bangles in front of another and he said, "Where'd you get those?"  
And she said, "I inherited them." 
And he said, "So the divorce is final, huh?"  

Ha.  Funny guy.  

And another is diligently deleting graffiti, names and signatures, from everything.  She cleaned off something written my desk with the Goo Gone.  "Don't do that!" I said.  "That wasn't a bad thing--it was a good memory."  She was indignant and kept on.  Those are touchstones, I explained.  I want them around.  She was indignant still.

One thing I still have.  One thing he left.  Was it of no value? 
I had a dream that it was gone, that it--like the clothes that still smelled of...Burbury?--was gone.  In the dream, I went to the restaurant and demanded it back....  So when I awoke, I dressed and went straight to the Gallery to make sure it was still there.  It was.  And it still plays music.  Ha...me and Davey Jones listening to music boxes from another era....  I can't find the green bracelet though.  The blue one, I have, but the green one has slipped away.


Like so much else, it slipped away.


So. 
I'll pour it out here.  Where no one is watching.  Pour it out until the pitcher is dry.