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Conor
The cemetery gate was rusted, the hinges ungreased for what seemed like years if not decades. A chain was wound through the bars. When Aurnia and I finally found someone with a key to unlock it, he looked at us suspiciously. He wanted to know what we wanted. We thought it was obvious. Apparently, it wasn’t.
We had to wander for a while to find her. We didn’t know exactly where she was. There was really no way to find out other than walking row by row. We were silent, Aurnia and I, her warm tiny hand in mine, as the nearby highway droned on. As the clouds drifted heavily overhead. As street lamps flickered on one by one, dusk again come too early.
“There,” Aurnia said, tugging at my hand.
She stopped two steps away when she saw I wasn’t moving with her, our arms extended, hands gripped exactly halfway between us.
How easy it would have been to just keep going. To pull Aurnia the other way. It wouldn’t be hard. She wasn’t strong enough to stop me. If I decided to run like I’d been running all these years. To pull her to the motorcycle parked outside the gate. To drive her home. To make love on the bed we shared. To hold her beneath the warmth of the sheets. To wake up to sunshine. To hope. To her.
Aurnia’s gaze was soft in the amber light. Kind and patient. She didn’t say a word, but her standing there was enough.
I needed to do this. I needed to face my past. Forgive myself. Let go.
I came to stand beside Aurnia with a pounding heart. Together we looked down at the simple, state-issued headstone carved with nothing more than a name and two dates. One for birth. One for death.
I sucked in a shaky breath. My lungs didn’t seem to think it was enough. Like the air here was thin. Aurnia’s fingers tightened around mine.
Shannon had overdosed in her sleep not long after we broke up. Her heart just stopped beating. She had died without knowing. Died without anyone knowing. It was childish of me to believe that maybe she was dreaming of family when it happened. Dreaming of me even.
I’d always wondered why she’d never reached out to me. Never tried to find me.
I’d just assumed that she didn’t think I had been worth fighting for. That she hadn’t loved me enough. Or never loved me at all.
The story wasn’t new: naive girl gets caught up in something bad. Gets dragged under by a current she didn’t know was so swift and violent. A tide unrelenting. Something lovely carelessly crushed. Like a violet underfoot.
When Aurnia and I learned of Shannon’s passing, the news threatened to wreck me. But Aurnia held me, anchored me, when I tried to withdraw in on myself. Gently pulled the whiskey bottle from my fingers when I emptied it too fast. Pulled me into her body, to ride her, crash into her, rather than to lose myself along a storm-drenched highway on my bike.
I said I should have known, but Aurnia reminded me that I’d had my own pain to swim against. I tried to say it was my fault, but she gently kissed my blame away. I tried to say that I could have stopped it, but she stripped me of my guilt as she stripped me of my clothes.
So I was there at Shannon’s grave to forgive her. To forgive myself. To set us both free.
Ever since that night, Shannon had been the cage that I lived in. And Nick had twisted the key in the lock. I’d hated her. I’d loved her. I’d ruined my life because of her.
But I didn’t want to sink anymore. I wanted to rise. To my sun. To Aurnia.
But the words wouldn’t come. I told Aurnia this.
Staring down at the little grave marker, Aurnia sighed softly and said, “You know, I don’t know whether my mother is alive or dead. When she left my life, she left it completely. No Christmas cards. No calls on my birthday. Nothing. If I were to find out that she was…gone… If I were to come to a place like this and find her. A horrible place. A lonely place. A place without any flowers in sight. I think I’d be feeling much the same as you are.”
She turned her pretty little face to look up at me. I smiled sadly and laughed just a little.
“And how is that?”
“Sadness,” she explained, keeping her gaze fixed on mine. “Sadness that someone I loved wasn’t there for me to love. Sadness that someone I wanted to give my everything to was someone who didn’t want it until it was too late. Sadness that I was right here. Always right here.”
I turned to look down at Shannon. The concrete was cracked around her. Rust was already moving in at the corners of her resting place.
Aurnia was silent beside me as I looked around at the rest of the grey cemetery. Treeless. Flowerless. Not even the overgrown vines on the rusted fence had any trace of colour. I looked at the cars whipping by on the highway. Tail lights red. Glaring. Angry. I thought of the red of Shannon’s hair. I thought of strawberries. Of picnic blankets under clear skies. I thought of lips stained from red wine. I didn’t think of anger.
Softly, slowly, I began, “Shannon, I’m sorry for the life we had stolen from us. Maybe you were the thief. Maybe it was me. Maybe it was Nick or the world or all of us. Or none of us. It’s too big for me to understand. To ever know. But I just want to say that I know that for a time I loved you. And you loved me. For a long time I thought that was the greatest curse of my life. Our loving one another so terribly. But I was wrong.”
I turned to look at Aurnia. Her eyes were still downturned. Her attention on the woman who came before her, on the reason that I was the way I was.
I smiled as I watched the wind sweeping dark hair from her pale cheek. “I learned that love makes you want to rise, to be better, to be happier. And that is never wrong.”
The corners of Aurnia’s lip rose in a soft, gentle smile. Her eyelids fluttered closed for a moment or two in the ensuing silence. I wondered what she was thinking. What she was saying as she lips mouthed something I couldn’t hear. Something I wasn’t meant to hear. A prayer maybe? I’d never known Aurnia to be religious. Was she saying something to Shannon? To herself? To me? I knew it would be another of those mysteries in the universe. Another of those things that I could never know. Never understand. Another of those things I wasn’t meant to.
