Sleeping With Ghosts

#-1

Prologue;

2nd of June

Part 1:

I traced the etching of a false proclamation twenty times over, the rasp of the damp wood under my fingertips and the tiny pricks as the sharp ridges caught on my skin did nothing to ease the ache that weighed down my limbs. The back of my sandpaper throat, the back of my eyes, burnt and strained with the pure physical exertion to keep the flood at bay. Each time my nails curved once more around the amateurishly carved love-heart, another memory emerged out of the soupy wasteland bog that was my mind. It pulsed with excitement, bled delight and  radiated wonder like a living, beating, heart.

Out came the first time we met. The hard tug I'd felt in my chest, the quickening of my heart. Her small hopeful smile from across the room. Her eyes glowing with a light from within, or maybe just accentuated by the stream of sun flowing through the crack in the window shutters, long eyelashes highlighted as she batted them. Her sweet voice, music swimming in my ears, drugging my brain with its shallow beauty.

The first time she'd inclined her head to kiss me softly, she had been taller than me two and a half years ago. The way she'd wrapped her arms around me. The way she'd leaned in and the way neither of us let go.

Each bout around the curves and points submerged the retrieved moment in our time together in a sticky slime of betrayal and sadness, coating it in a film of sorrowful tears.

The many blissful hot summer evenings spent with melted ice cream stuck to our hands and lips, how we didn't care. The world and its worries, its problems and its griefs couldn't touch us. It couldn't penetrate the steel bubble of careless child-like glee and contentment. Those many memories were now thoroughly drenched in a consuming sadness as indestructible as the shield of happiness that had enveloped us. It was an ineffable loss of something non-living, more beautiful than life, that had withered and died all the same.

The picnic basket, the ribbons she'd weaved through the wicker. Little girls with pink strips braided through their hair tugged on my heart strings more than they ever should have.  The familiar scent of ham sandwiches, under seasoned but no less delicious. The smell and the taste of the salty meat brought a threatening lump up my throat that choked me at the most inopportune times. The feel of the crunchy grass beneath and the hard wood behind. The memories it brought tore at me from the soul outwards, clawing my flesh and leaving me in tatters. The sound of her tinkling bell laugh that rang through the crisp morning air when she ran to hug me at the beginning of the day. The sense-memory of the cramps in my belly when we giggled together warped and twisted into a gnarled stabbing pain in my gut.

The very sight of her face in all of its pale spring morning beauty radiated not an exuberant, delightful warmth, but a cold wind that brought needles of ice that bore into my eyes and ears and mouth until it was writhing around my bones. My mind's eye conjured that thing of terrible beauty and blissful pain, then concealed in a straight-toothed, suggestive smile, and dunked it in the deep well of a sad blue paint. Now marbled and warped with the extra layer, I could see the ugly beneath it all. The revelation did not arrive hand in hand with a redeeming consolation, but with a bitter mockery of my foolishness.

Trees bowed around me. In return the winds applauded a well-acted play of tragedy as the clouds let down a curtain of ominous rain. Grass swayed and rustled musically, a bitter orchestra for a bitter ending. The heavy clouds boomed out a drum solo as the released a torrent on the land below.  The wind howled and tossed leaves and the rain spat at the ground horizontally and the smell of wet earth permeated the air. Trees shrieked and moaned and even cracked under the pressure. As the wood ached, so did my heart. Yearning for something that was irrational to yearn for and even less likely to happen.

When the heavens opened, so did the floodgates. Great heaving sobs were racked from my throat, rattling my rib cage and keeping in time with the weather and nature's cacophony. The clouds spat in my face and the rain mingled with my tears. Salt and fresh water painted my cheeks and were eventually joined by an embarrassing sea of slime unleashed from my noise. I gasped and gulped, inhaling all three substances at once. Tears were wrung from somewhere deep down. I tugged on my hair, trying to reign back the wail working its way up from my lungs. I leaned my forehead back against the trunk of the tree and screamed my sorrows at its thick boughs.

The three-foot thick oak bore witness to the pounds of pain I was shedding. Absorbing my tears soaked into the ground through its roots, absorbing the awful emotions screeched into the air through it's aged and widened bark, like it had absorbed the melancholy-drenched memories of happiness. Its branches didn't crack or even bend under the weight of all the sadness it had soaked in. The leaves pointed to the sky, the limit it was reaching for, and for all it had observed, the tiny shenanigans of my life in contrast to it's long years, didn't phase it. The heart-felt turmoil I screamed into it made it stronger, renewing grip in its roots and adding a new potent coat of green to its hundreds of thousands of leaves.

The only mark it had allowed to mar its sturdy skin, was borne of the pure goodness I had been wallowing in when I carved out initials into its base.