Rocked
I clutched the ring in my hands, dropped it to the bottom of the pocket, picked it up again, and rolled it around with my finger—every day. Once it was just a cold-footed habit, a happy spark and a reluctance to commit. But its edges became laced with dread; when I dropped it in the pocket it seemed to fall forever. I wondered how it hadn’t forged a hole in the cloth, how my infidelity didn’t disintegrate it.
Would she have said yes? I doubt I’ll ever know.
***
Crash. I remember it clearly, and I can see it now. Sometimes it blinds me. When I think of it, that chiseled face and the prickle of that salty curled hair, my insides rumble.
It was ten minutes short of 5:00, and I fumbled the excess baggage in my hands—sunglasses, purse, coffee—like a chicken in boxing gloves, as I tried to push the door open. And that’s when I heard it. His low, hollow laugh echoed down the street, reverberating through the hundreds of honking horns pulsating through every grid-block of the island. But it wasn’t the sight of my face that aroused it. The girl he was talking to could have been anyone—small, short, tall, wide; blonde brown yellow blue gold—I don’t care. The point is I knew the dynamic all too well. I’ve changed, he had said, just give it one more chance. After all we’ve been through—please.
I heard the way the syllables of her laugh danced across each drum of his, saw how his head cocked out over her shoulder like an indecent Egyptian dance move in the middle of an embrace I thought was defeating me. I didn’t know I was defeating myself. All I knew was that she wasn’t me and he couldn’t even see me past her silly little smile, a dim, crooked light I imagined was stained with half-witted radiance.
And in one moment, standing on the sultry street corner I would grow to hate, I could feel it all—the implications of what happened three weeks prior made me dizzy. The images danced in front of my eyes like those tiny rainbow dots right before you faint. But I wasn’t going to faint—I was forced to face it all. The unobstructed groans of sickening pleasure. The rustle of the silky white sheets I thought were mine. The muggy, sticky air of dirty sex. Sex to which I received no invitation. I thought it wouldn’t be long before I got a ring, before I could lift a shiny rock on a big middle finger at the entirety of his family—I wasn’t expecting to be shut out by the sweat of bleached blonde hair on my pillow and the grunts of someone who should have been making sounds in my ear.
After all we’ve been through. Right. After all we’ve been through, I shouldn’t have been shocked by the conversation I was witnessing, the laughing and smiling and gentle embrace. By the time she was gone and he reached me, I knew it would always be like this. I would never forget those sounds, that warm air. So I did not want to be drawn back in by his great fishing line. The hook had drawn blood already and he didn’t deserve anymore of it. I didn’t have time for an argument, and the one we poorly constructed I’ve erased from my memory like the measly words on a chalkboard they were. But erasers don’t completely delete the damage; that mocking white film stays behind. And oh, how it mocks me now.
Go away, I said in the end. Leave. I guess I didn’t know what that really meant; I thought he deserved a solid, firm shove. Just so he knew I was in charge of the situation—just so he felt some of the force I had been holding back. As soon as my hands left his chest, I turned a corner, sunglasses leaning sideways on my nose like a seesaw and purse swung over my back like someone important, and that’s when it happened. I heard it before I saw it. A big, ghastly crash.
Live in New York for several years and you’d think that faceless little white man on the sign would start working in your favor, but not a damn thing can stop a cynical and tired cab driver at the end of his shift at rush hour. Not even a 6-foot Roman statue falling into the street.
***
Crash. I remember it clearly, and I can see it now. It has blinded me indefinitely. It was almost 5:00, and I was early for her. I had a shiny glint of half-happiness in my pocket; I tried to tell myself it was right, hoped it would outshine the walking lust I had become. I stood on the corner, basking in the few shards of sun that pulsed around the side of the building. I didn’t want to walk down the street just yet, wanted to see her from a distance, not just with a gust of wind and stress as she came out the door. I thought that I could explain, that seeing her tiniest freckle just inches from my face would be possible every day from then on. I wanted to stay away, to be a stranger if only for a minute.
“Excuse me, could you tell me which way I go to get to Broadway?”
If I had known the later implications of the sweet, southern voice behind me, I wouldn’t have answered. But I did. And, like always, the confused tourist’s accent noticed my accent and, like always, there was a connection. A friend of a cousin of a fraternity brother—something like that. You can run as far as New York, but you can’t escape the armpit you grew up in. But some stupid thing about it makes you want to discuss it, makes you want to relive those glory days that really weren’t so glorious at all. And, like always, the conversation ends with a smile and a laugh, a hug to seal the deal. As she walked away and I saw that other face down the street—the one I had made so contorted, so hollow and angular with my choices—the crooked sunglasses she had stopped in the middle of putting on, the face that wasn’t as it should be, I swallowed hard. For I knew something painful was about to happen. I guess I just wasn’t expecting the type of pain it would be, the brandishing crash of her two hands on my chest, the one in my mind when she stormed away, and the all-telling one that engulfed my body in a mid-street’s mocking yellow jolt.
A two-block instructional on how to get to Broadway, a premature end of the workday half a block down the street, and a justified suspicion was all it took. Now I’m here. I don’t even remember it hitting; I didn’t feel the pain—externally.
***
“Ma’am, I’ve already told you it would probably be in your best interest to leave.” The nurse stands before me, the squint in her eye and slight twitch of her mouth as she speaks indicating that she’s struggling not to think I’m a murderer, that she’s on the brink of failing to objectively assess the situation. “…and I’d rather not have to do so again. We’re trying to be understanding. We know you must be hurting, but your presence is really disturbing the family, and I…well…I can’t say they don’t have reason.”
Just like the last time she weasled her way over to me, I say nothing to the nurse. But this time I look up, and I guess she sees something in my eyes—something beyond the dirt and shit I feel my head immersed in—because she continues, “Well, of course, we’re by no means assuming this is your fault. But you must understand. They’re undergoing…trauma. Their son, brother, friend is in a coma.”
Everything inside me shouts. He hates them. He worked his whole life to get away from them, you stupid bitch. They only feel guilty because they think he’s dying. The rumble grows louder. My veins do a witch’s dance. My smallest capillary slams her head against the sickeningly white wall. But again I cannot move, and again she walks away, and I’m left with the wall.
I see that little white man dancing in every dried paint drop on the wall. That stupid triangular stance. That devoid face. Maybe he doesn’t have a face for this sole purpose—to mock me, to make me create one for him. One that’s all too familiar and one I don’t want to see. Not like this. He seems to scream at me, “WALK,” No. “RUN.” And I wish I could. I wish I could just run, run away from him, run into the street. Let me run the steps he took because of me and let them run me.
***
“That bitch thinks she deserves to be here? To see him? She’s the reason he’s here! Hell, she’s the reason we’re all here.”
“He never did know how to pick them. Always went for the bougie bimbos because they had a designer’s name on their tags and a cold, northern heart on their sleeves.”
“Atheist bitch.”
I keep trying to scream. Keep trying to raise this damn hand. Go away, my insides yell. Leave. It’s the last thing I heard from her and the only thing I want to say to them.
They hate it so much here, so why did they even come? We’ve barely even spoken since they first met her. Didn’t have a twang to her voice or a cross around her neck, so she wasn’t good enough.
“She’s not Baptist?,” Mother had begged. “Oh, I just don’t know if I can reconcile….she’s what? An atheist?...Well, yes I know you didn’t say that, but you just said yourself she ‘doesn’t believe in a higher power,’” she air-quoted as she rolled her eyes and reached for the handkerchief in her pocket to wipe the newly formed beads of sweat from her forehead.
She really tried. She even agreed to go to church with us; she practiced the Lord’s Prayer and rifled through a Hymnal. But that sent Mother over the edge.
“I won’t have the presence of Satan riding on my son and invading my family, oh no!...Overreacting? Did I hear that correctly? There’s one thing we told you growing up and it was to keep your eyes on God and all would be well. Well, son, you’re looking directly away from God and that’s the same as greeting the face of the devil with a smile.”
I thought time might fix it. I thought distance would help. But now, as I feel the weight of the shiny rock drawing me in like a magnet from the pocket of my coat in the chair across the room, I know it never intended to rest on her finger.
I had gone home just two weeks ago, walked through the door unannounced, sex and sin still dampening my skin with humiliation, and I asked for the ring--my ring.
“You give this to the beautiful girl you’ll want to marry one day, you hear? I have no use for it anymore—just weighs me down. Make sure it sits on the right hand, boy,” my grandmother had told me on my sixteenth birthday. In the safe of my parents’ house had it remained, and I wanted it back. She was going to be part of the family and she was going to purify me—the ring was going to help.
“You mean to tell me you want Grandma’s ring for an Atheist?....Son, she doesn’t believe in the Lord Himself. Now, I’ve already told you that’s the definition of Atheism. You take that ring if you want to feel your father’s cold fist and your grandmother having another heart attack six feet under.”
And tremors from below I do feel now, but not the way I had expected. I took the ring anyway, images bouncing off the mirrors in my mind’s maze: the string of why can’t you just propose and am I not good enough to marry? I was finally going to do it, but something again had stopped me. This time it had been her.
Did she run after me? Was the crash what she wanted? Is she here because she regrets it? Does she regret me? I can’t help but wonder, but I fear I’ll never know.
Why are they here anyway? And why is she out there? If you’re not going to let her in, just give her my clothes. I can feel them, their glimmer, on that chair and out of my reach. Just have her reach her hand into the jacket pocket. Just so she’ll know.
But they won’t—not even if they could hear me.
***
My whole life stands before me like a big, sadistic cork board—thumbtacks and cement in every picture I can’t un-see. I feel them crawling up my nose like little baby spiders snipping at my hairs and burning like a fresh line of cocaine. I smell the manic pulses—they’re dry and try to drown me with a punch of that musty, rotten scent that comes from spilled garbage juice on the street. If only they could. I want to kill them—no smell no smell no smell.
I reach for my mouth, finger dancing across the white, jagged edges. When did everything get so sharp? I feel the chip with the end of my thumb callus; it doesn’t cut anymore. It feels the same as it did six months ago when it was born, just a little more empty, a little more cavity-like, a hole I want to make bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until I fall into it. I think about him telling me the story about chipping his own tooth, dropped off the changing table before the age of two. I think of how I chipped this one, falling off the bed in a moment of passion, long before even that was taken from me, whose memory now throbs as it stabs my insides with its cruel knife. When did everything. Get. So. Sharp?
I can do it all, the guilt and the hate and the sickness; I can do it all except the memories. They’re here, and they swirl all around me like little gnats that laugh in my ear. How he would never let his bare feet touch the floor—slippers had to be there in the morning, in the night, beside the bed. How it drove me insane. How he refused to capitalize the ‘H’ in Hitler. “Only big H that bastard deserves is the one in Hell.”
How we took a wrong turn and had to ask directions at the house of a decrepit, poor old woman. How he had seen the lack of appliances, the dirt and grime that filled her living room and permeated everything behind the doorway without a door. How he had scribbled down the address and had seen to it that a money order was placed, promptly, for the delivery of a brand new oven, stove, and coverage of two months' worth of electricity to the house—only to find that upon delivery the home was abandoned. How he had mourned the loss of something, someone, he had never known. Someone he knew that sometime somewhere, someone had known, had loved. How they would feel the sorrow he acted out for them, for he imagined they would not know—much like he didn't, what had taken place. How he shined in those moments. How he was before I knew what I know now. How he cried. How I can't. How I wish I could.
What I wouldn't give for a single drop of hissing liquid down my face—the only thing saturating it now being the scent of rubbing alcohol and the sounds of machines beeping incessantly and maddeningly—my only hydration being the dizzying whiteness all around me, the smirking breeze, and the swirling conglomeration of nothingness. This, too, will become but a memory. A long one that will never end, that will always play before my eyes like a redundant, only multiplying picture—even when those eyes are shut tight as the door I stare at, the one they won't let me in. That is what I cannot bear. I just want to feel him, to see him or smell him or hear him. Some way. Somehow.
And then I hear it. The click, click, click of the nurse’s heels coming down the hallway.
“Excuse me, ma’am. We’re really going to have to ask you…”
I stand up before she can finish. Or maybe she does—it’s all blurred together for me. Except that door. It is solid. I look at its firmness, behind which are the people who hate me the most, the one I loved the most, and all the filth and what they would call “sin” that I no longer care about. All those things are there, frozen behind a wall I can’t tear down. As I stand up to walk away, I know the little faceless white walking man has won.
***
Somewhere in the distance, I hear footsteps going toward the end of a tunnel. Sounds become muffled, but I think I hear a nurse and a door and a sigh of relief. But for what?
The shimmer of the ring fades in front of my eyes—the little dancing specs within the blackness become less and less visible. I feel her tipping off the side of my world, taking the meaning of that rock, that rock that has rocked me, with her.
Would she have said yes? I feel my bones dancing again, slipping towards a spiral of darkness and away from the words of those around me, which turn to mush and disappear in a pudding of horror and fulfillment. And I doubt I’ll ever know.
Would she have said yes? I doubt I’ll ever know.
***
Crash. I remember it clearly, and I can see it now. Sometimes it blinds me. When I think of it, that chiseled face and the prickle of that salty curled hair, my insides rumble.
It was ten minutes short of 5:00, and I fumbled the excess baggage in my hands—sunglasses, purse, coffee—like a chicken in boxing gloves, as I tried to push the door open. And that’s when I heard it. His low, hollow laugh echoed down the street, reverberating through the hundreds of honking horns pulsating through every grid-block of the island. But it wasn’t the sight of my face that aroused it. The girl he was talking to could have been anyone—small, short, tall, wide; blonde brown yellow blue gold—I don’t care. The point is I knew the dynamic all too well. I’ve changed, he had said, just give it one more chance. After all we’ve been through—please.
I heard the way the syllables of her laugh danced across each drum of his, saw how his head cocked out over her shoulder like an indecent Egyptian dance move in the middle of an embrace I thought was defeating me. I didn’t know I was defeating myself. All I knew was that she wasn’t me and he couldn’t even see me past her silly little smile, a dim, crooked light I imagined was stained with half-witted radiance.
And in one moment, standing on the sultry street corner I would grow to hate, I could feel it all—the implications of what happened three weeks prior made me dizzy. The images danced in front of my eyes like those tiny rainbow dots right before you faint. But I wasn’t going to faint—I was forced to face it all. The unobstructed groans of sickening pleasure. The rustle of the silky white sheets I thought were mine. The muggy, sticky air of dirty sex. Sex to which I received no invitation. I thought it wouldn’t be long before I got a ring, before I could lift a shiny rock on a big middle finger at the entirety of his family—I wasn’t expecting to be shut out by the sweat of bleached blonde hair on my pillow and the grunts of someone who should have been making sounds in my ear.
After all we’ve been through. Right. After all we’ve been through, I shouldn’t have been shocked by the conversation I was witnessing, the laughing and smiling and gentle embrace. By the time she was gone and he reached me, I knew it would always be like this. I would never forget those sounds, that warm air. So I did not want to be drawn back in by his great fishing line. The hook had drawn blood already and he didn’t deserve anymore of it. I didn’t have time for an argument, and the one we poorly constructed I’ve erased from my memory like the measly words on a chalkboard they were. But erasers don’t completely delete the damage; that mocking white film stays behind. And oh, how it mocks me now.
Go away, I said in the end. Leave. I guess I didn’t know what that really meant; I thought he deserved a solid, firm shove. Just so he knew I was in charge of the situation—just so he felt some of the force I had been holding back. As soon as my hands left his chest, I turned a corner, sunglasses leaning sideways on my nose like a seesaw and purse swung over my back like someone important, and that’s when it happened. I heard it before I saw it. A big, ghastly crash.
Live in New York for several years and you’d think that faceless little white man on the sign would start working in your favor, but not a damn thing can stop a cynical and tired cab driver at the end of his shift at rush hour. Not even a 6-foot Roman statue falling into the street.
***
Crash. I remember it clearly, and I can see it now. It has blinded me indefinitely. It was almost 5:00, and I was early for her. I had a shiny glint of half-happiness in my pocket; I tried to tell myself it was right, hoped it would outshine the walking lust I had become. I stood on the corner, basking in the few shards of sun that pulsed around the side of the building. I didn’t want to walk down the street just yet, wanted to see her from a distance, not just with a gust of wind and stress as she came out the door. I thought that I could explain, that seeing her tiniest freckle just inches from my face would be possible every day from then on. I wanted to stay away, to be a stranger if only for a minute.
“Excuse me, could you tell me which way I go to get to Broadway?”
If I had known the later implications of the sweet, southern voice behind me, I wouldn’t have answered. But I did. And, like always, the confused tourist’s accent noticed my accent and, like always, there was a connection. A friend of a cousin of a fraternity brother—something like that. You can run as far as New York, but you can’t escape the armpit you grew up in. But some stupid thing about it makes you want to discuss it, makes you want to relive those glory days that really weren’t so glorious at all. And, like always, the conversation ends with a smile and a laugh, a hug to seal the deal. As she walked away and I saw that other face down the street—the one I had made so contorted, so hollow and angular with my choices—the crooked sunglasses she had stopped in the middle of putting on, the face that wasn’t as it should be, I swallowed hard. For I knew something painful was about to happen. I guess I just wasn’t expecting the type of pain it would be, the brandishing crash of her two hands on my chest, the one in my mind when she stormed away, and the all-telling one that engulfed my body in a mid-street’s mocking yellow jolt.
A two-block instructional on how to get to Broadway, a premature end of the workday half a block down the street, and a justified suspicion was all it took. Now I’m here. I don’t even remember it hitting; I didn’t feel the pain—externally.
***
“Ma’am, I’ve already told you it would probably be in your best interest to leave.” The nurse stands before me, the squint in her eye and slight twitch of her mouth as she speaks indicating that she’s struggling not to think I’m a murderer, that she’s on the brink of failing to objectively assess the situation. “…and I’d rather not have to do so again. We’re trying to be understanding. We know you must be hurting, but your presence is really disturbing the family, and I…well…I can’t say they don’t have reason.”
Just like the last time she weasled her way over to me, I say nothing to the nurse. But this time I look up, and I guess she sees something in my eyes—something beyond the dirt and shit I feel my head immersed in—because she continues, “Well, of course, we’re by no means assuming this is your fault. But you must understand. They’re undergoing…trauma. Their son, brother, friend is in a coma.”
Everything inside me shouts. He hates them. He worked his whole life to get away from them, you stupid bitch. They only feel guilty because they think he’s dying. The rumble grows louder. My veins do a witch’s dance. My smallest capillary slams her head against the sickeningly white wall. But again I cannot move, and again she walks away, and I’m left with the wall.
I see that little white man dancing in every dried paint drop on the wall. That stupid triangular stance. That devoid face. Maybe he doesn’t have a face for this sole purpose—to mock me, to make me create one for him. One that’s all too familiar and one I don’t want to see. Not like this. He seems to scream at me, “WALK,” No. “RUN.” And I wish I could. I wish I could just run, run away from him, run into the street. Let me run the steps he took because of me and let them run me.
***
“That bitch thinks she deserves to be here? To see him? She’s the reason he’s here! Hell, she’s the reason we’re all here.”
“He never did know how to pick them. Always went for the bougie bimbos because they had a designer’s name on their tags and a cold, northern heart on their sleeves.”
“Atheist bitch.”
I keep trying to scream. Keep trying to raise this damn hand. Go away, my insides yell. Leave. It’s the last thing I heard from her and the only thing I want to say to them.
They hate it so much here, so why did they even come? We’ve barely even spoken since they first met her. Didn’t have a twang to her voice or a cross around her neck, so she wasn’t good enough.
“She’s not Baptist?,” Mother had begged. “Oh, I just don’t know if I can reconcile….she’s what? An atheist?...Well, yes I know you didn’t say that, but you just said yourself she ‘doesn’t believe in a higher power,’” she air-quoted as she rolled her eyes and reached for the handkerchief in her pocket to wipe the newly formed beads of sweat from her forehead.
She really tried. She even agreed to go to church with us; she practiced the Lord’s Prayer and rifled through a Hymnal. But that sent Mother over the edge.
“I won’t have the presence of Satan riding on my son and invading my family, oh no!...Overreacting? Did I hear that correctly? There’s one thing we told you growing up and it was to keep your eyes on God and all would be well. Well, son, you’re looking directly away from God and that’s the same as greeting the face of the devil with a smile.”
I thought time might fix it. I thought distance would help. But now, as I feel the weight of the shiny rock drawing me in like a magnet from the pocket of my coat in the chair across the room, I know it never intended to rest on her finger.
I had gone home just two weeks ago, walked through the door unannounced, sex and sin still dampening my skin with humiliation, and I asked for the ring--my ring.
“You give this to the beautiful girl you’ll want to marry one day, you hear? I have no use for it anymore—just weighs me down. Make sure it sits on the right hand, boy,” my grandmother had told me on my sixteenth birthday. In the safe of my parents’ house had it remained, and I wanted it back. She was going to be part of the family and she was going to purify me—the ring was going to help.
“You mean to tell me you want Grandma’s ring for an Atheist?....Son, she doesn’t believe in the Lord Himself. Now, I’ve already told you that’s the definition of Atheism. You take that ring if you want to feel your father’s cold fist and your grandmother having another heart attack six feet under.”
And tremors from below I do feel now, but not the way I had expected. I took the ring anyway, images bouncing off the mirrors in my mind’s maze: the string of why can’t you just propose and am I not good enough to marry? I was finally going to do it, but something again had stopped me. This time it had been her.
Did she run after me? Was the crash what she wanted? Is she here because she regrets it? Does she regret me? I can’t help but wonder, but I fear I’ll never know.
Why are they here anyway? And why is she out there? If you’re not going to let her in, just give her my clothes. I can feel them, their glimmer, on that chair and out of my reach. Just have her reach her hand into the jacket pocket. Just so she’ll know.
But they won’t—not even if they could hear me.
***
My whole life stands before me like a big, sadistic cork board—thumbtacks and cement in every picture I can’t un-see. I feel them crawling up my nose like little baby spiders snipping at my hairs and burning like a fresh line of cocaine. I smell the manic pulses—they’re dry and try to drown me with a punch of that musty, rotten scent that comes from spilled garbage juice on the street. If only they could. I want to kill them—no smell no smell no smell.
I reach for my mouth, finger dancing across the white, jagged edges. When did everything get so sharp? I feel the chip with the end of my thumb callus; it doesn’t cut anymore. It feels the same as it did six months ago when it was born, just a little more empty, a little more cavity-like, a hole I want to make bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until I fall into it. I think about him telling me the story about chipping his own tooth, dropped off the changing table before the age of two. I think of how I chipped this one, falling off the bed in a moment of passion, long before even that was taken from me, whose memory now throbs as it stabs my insides with its cruel knife. When did everything. Get. So. Sharp?
I can do it all, the guilt and the hate and the sickness; I can do it all except the memories. They’re here, and they swirl all around me like little gnats that laugh in my ear. How he would never let his bare feet touch the floor—slippers had to be there in the morning, in the night, beside the bed. How it drove me insane. How he refused to capitalize the ‘H’ in Hitler. “Only big H that bastard deserves is the one in Hell.”
How we took a wrong turn and had to ask directions at the house of a decrepit, poor old woman. How he had seen the lack of appliances, the dirt and grime that filled her living room and permeated everything behind the doorway without a door. How he had scribbled down the address and had seen to it that a money order was placed, promptly, for the delivery of a brand new oven, stove, and coverage of two months' worth of electricity to the house—only to find that upon delivery the home was abandoned. How he had mourned the loss of something, someone, he had never known. Someone he knew that sometime somewhere, someone had known, had loved. How they would feel the sorrow he acted out for them, for he imagined they would not know—much like he didn't, what had taken place. How he shined in those moments. How he was before I knew what I know now. How he cried. How I can't. How I wish I could.
What I wouldn't give for a single drop of hissing liquid down my face—the only thing saturating it now being the scent of rubbing alcohol and the sounds of machines beeping incessantly and maddeningly—my only hydration being the dizzying whiteness all around me, the smirking breeze, and the swirling conglomeration of nothingness. This, too, will become but a memory. A long one that will never end, that will always play before my eyes like a redundant, only multiplying picture—even when those eyes are shut tight as the door I stare at, the one they won't let me in. That is what I cannot bear. I just want to feel him, to see him or smell him or hear him. Some way. Somehow.
And then I hear it. The click, click, click of the nurse’s heels coming down the hallway.
“Excuse me, ma’am. We’re really going to have to ask you…”
I stand up before she can finish. Or maybe she does—it’s all blurred together for me. Except that door. It is solid. I look at its firmness, behind which are the people who hate me the most, the one I loved the most, and all the filth and what they would call “sin” that I no longer care about. All those things are there, frozen behind a wall I can’t tear down. As I stand up to walk away, I know the little faceless white walking man has won.
***
Somewhere in the distance, I hear footsteps going toward the end of a tunnel. Sounds become muffled, but I think I hear a nurse and a door and a sigh of relief. But for what?
The shimmer of the ring fades in front of my eyes—the little dancing specs within the blackness become less and less visible. I feel her tipping off the side of my world, taking the meaning of that rock, that rock that has rocked me, with her.
Would she have said yes? I feel my bones dancing again, slipping towards a spiral of darkness and away from the words of those around me, which turn to mush and disappear in a pudding of horror and fulfillment. And I doubt I’ll ever know.