Forgetting Sylva

After

Marcus

Sometimes, it's hard to remember that she's gone.
I'll roll over in bed and imagine her there. Her small, frail, warm body. Thin arms and legs, her slim waist beneath my fingers, the fresh scent unique to her.

She feels so real.

And then I'll open my eyes and remember that it isn't her; she isn't here.
The smell is just the soft memory of her on the sheets, seventeen years of moments made and lost.

I didn't let them change them, even though it's been a week.

My parents keep trying to get me to come home, to sleep in my own bed. But it isn't mine, not when she doesn't exist.
Olivia came once a day, lay next to me on the bed and asked me to come home.
Those were her opening words, her closing words, every time.

"She's gone, Marc," she'd say.

A while ago I realised that the sheets stopped smelling like her and started smelling like my sister's perfume, and when she came I screamed at her to leave, because she was making it smell like her, erasing one of the tenuous connections I had left.
She didn't come again.
I don't have it in me to regret the look I put on her face: a mask of tears.
I have nothing left in me.

I press my face to the sheets and breathe in, searching for her, a part of her she forgot when she left. But I can't smell her; all there is is me. I have replaced her scent with my own.

Slowly, I get up. My bones creak and ache, and I wonder if they feel like hers did, if she felt like this every day.
It must have been worse.
I would put up with it, though.
I would live with it, if she were here.

I go into her bathroom. The chair in the shower is empty. Her soap is beside it, her shampoo by the sink.
I smell horrible.
I strip off my clothes and wash myself, using her shampoo even though mine is there as well.
It smells like her, and I close my eyes and breathe it in, remembering the silken feel of her silvered hair through my fingers.

I turn off the water and get dressed, but I am only going through the motions.
When I go back into her room, her mother is there, lying on her side of the bed.
She stares at the ceiling, tears in her eyes.

Silently, I lie beside her, look up at the ceiling too, wondering how many times she went through the same motion.

"It doesn't even smell like her anymore," I say. My voice is choked.

Evelyn looks at me, and then she takes my hand, and they rest between us on the blankets.
She's as much a mother to me as my own, but my own wouldn't understand how I feel.
She didn't love her like I did. Do. Doesn't love her like I do.

"She was always fading," Evelyn says quietly, her voice hoarse.
I close my eyes, but my ears are always open.
"She wouldn't want this for you, Marc. She'd want you to remember her. But not like this."
I don't want to hear this. Not from anyone. But her voice sounds so like hers and I can't I don't want to no.

I shake my head silently. She is watching me. I can feel it.

"Syl would be disappointed in you," Evelyn says.

And there it is.
Her name.
I've been avoiding it, as if not thinking or saying it would make it less real. Less concrete. The fact that she no longer exists while I am still here.
Her name is as soft and quiet and ethereal as she was.
I imagine her chiding me for doing this, for not living my life while hers has ended.
And this gets through to me where nothing else has.

"Marcus? Are you hearing me? Are you there?" she asks.

I am quiet for a moment.
Quiet in this room, on this bed that knew her body as well as I did.
Evelyn's fingers squeeze mine.

"I'm still here," I whisper.