Sheeran Claus {Ed Sheeran}

Chapter Three

Edward Christopher Sheeran

     As soon as she left, it seemed as if everyone else started to fade away. No one bothered to call, there were no messages left in my inbox and the postman seemingly no longer delivered to my house.  The people I would pass by in town looked at me as if I was a simple wind passing through cold, Christmas weather.  The clouds in the sky formed a dark blockade over me that allowed no escape. 

    It wasn't depression. I didn't feel as if I was stuck in a hole with a shovel; digging my way through a maze that contained no end.  I wasn't hooked by the cuff of my ankle fifty feet deep in a river that gave me one breath of air every second I came closer to death.  I didn't feel that I was done, that everything was over, that she was gone and she wasn't coming back.

     No one believed my theories anymore.  The ones about how she might have gone missing, that someone might have taken her from me, that she might be lost somewhere and trying to find her way back to me.  Nothing I had to say seemed to matter to the minds of my family and friends. The long, three a.m. phone calls I used to have with a brother I had been close to since grade school vanished like water evaporating from the pacific ocean on a hot summers day. Although, they didn't condensate and precipitate back down to the place I had vacated for these past three years.

     My eyes flickered to the left, glancing up and down the old grandfather clock that stood in the corner of the sitting room.  The tick-toking clicked and clacked throughout the pinna of my ear, creating an unsettling disturbance to erupt throughout my veins.  My legs echoed forward, the arteries poking throughout my pale, frosty skin as the joints snapped together slowly as if they were rusted, worn out elements on a machine created in the late 1800's.  The upstairs master bedroom was my only closure of her.  Her kisses still lingered from my neck down to my chest, her fragrance was embedded into the threading of my sheets which I refused to wash.

     I gripped onto the door handle, tugging and watching it swing open quickly as my eyes glanced along the open land that led up to my home. Clouds of white covered the ground below, slippery frozen patches laid across the sidewalks, waiting for me to walk along them and fall onto my cowardly rear.  The flowers dipped their heads down in shame, showing nothing less than what this life was full of.  

     I could feel the glares and glances that were sent towards this residence, the sound of my own songs and singles were blared throughout speakers almost as if they were in a mocking tone--and though it was hard for me to believe, it was true.  Everyone knew that she left me, her items were still here although there existed no sign of her, just a note that I hadn't bothered to open; dated six months ago before our anniversary: which she had forgotten. 

     She was on a new type of medication, anyone would have forgotten something as simple as an anniversary.  Maybe that's just what I'd like to think about that day.  I planned a proposal, stepping forward into the next level of love that she would have journeyed through with me, although she didn't show up that day.  I sat there for hours, calling, texting, e-mailing, skyping; no answer.  

     I didn't quite know where she was that night.  Maybe she was giving love to another man.  Maybe it really was the medication affecting her sleeping patterns.  Maybe the bruises that covered her arms and legs meant nothing other than she had gotten in a fight with her brother and things had escalated. 

     She was the stupidest woman I've ever laid my eyes across.  Too forgiving; too loving; too giving.  I didn't quite understand how she could stand living in that broken down trailer for sixteen straight years.  Pedophiles and rapists living right around every corner you turned just to leave your front porch and pick up a package of overcooked oatmeal cookies your grandmother sent you for the winter.