The Air He Breathes

April 3rd, 2014

Four Days Until Goodbye

I stood on my parents’ back porch staring at the pouring rain hammering against the swing set Dad and I had built for Charlie. The tire swing swayed back and forth against the wooden frame.

“How are you holding up?” Dad asked, walking outside to join me. Zeus followed behind him and found a place to sit and stay dry in the corner. I turned to Dad and stared at a face that resembled mine in almost every way, except that there were a few more years of age and wisdom in his eyes.

I didn’t reply to his question, but turned back to the rain.

“Your mom said you were having trouble writing the obituaries?” he asked. “I can help.”

“I don’t need your help,” I growled lightly, my fingers forming fists, my nails digging into my palms. I hated how angry I felt each passing day. I hated how I blamed the people around me for the accident. I hated that I was becoming colder each passing moment. “I don’t need anyone.”

“Son.” He sighed, placing his hand on my shoulder.

I pulled away. “I just want to be alone.”

His head lowered, and he ran his fingers across the back of his neck. “Okay. Mom and I will be inside.” A second later he turned away and opened the screen door. “But, Tristan, just because you want to be alone, doesn’t mean you are alone. Remember that. We are always here when you need us.”

I listened to the screen door slam and huffed at his words.

We are always here when you need us.

The truth of the matter was ‘always’ had an expiration date.

Reaching into my back pocket, I pulled out the piece of paper I’d spent the past three hours staring at. I’d finished Jamie’s obituary early that morning, but Charlie’s was still blank in my hand, with only his name attached to it.

How was I supposed to do it? How was I supposed to write his life story when his life hadn’t even had a chance to begin?

The rain began to slam against the paper and tears climbed into my eyes. I blinked a few times before shoving the paper back into my pocket.

I wouldn’t cry.

Fuck the tears.

My feet led me down the steps of the porch and within seconds I was soaked from head to toe, becoming a part of the dark storm that was brewing.

I needed air. I needed space. I needed to escape.

I needed to run.

I started running with no shoes, with no thought, and with no direction.

Zeus began to run behind me. “Go home, Zeus!” I shouted toward the dog, who was just as soaking wet as I was. “Go away!” I hollered, wanting to be left alone. I ran faster, but he kept up. I pushed so much that my chest burned and breathing became a chore. I ran until my legs quit and my body fell to the ground. Lightning struck above us, painting the sky with its scars, and I began to sob uncontrollably.

I wanted to be alone, but Zeus was right there. He’d kept up with my crazed mind, he was right beside me when I hit rock bottom, and he wasn’t going to leave me. He was in my face, giving me kisses, giving me love, giving me himself to hold when I needed someone the most.

“Okay.” I sighed, tears still falling as I held him close to me. He whimpered, almost as if he too was heartbroken. “Okay,” I said again, kissing the top of his head and rubbing his side.

Okay.

***

I loved to run barefoot.

Running was something I was good at.

I liked when my feet ran away.

I liked when they cracked and bled from the pressure they felt hammering against the concrete streets.

I liked when I was reminded of my sins through the pains of my body.

I love to hurt.

But only myself. I loved to hurt myself. No one else had to be hurt by me. I stayed away from people so I wouldn’t hurt them.

I’d hurt Elizabeth, and I didn’t want to.

I’m sorry.

How could I apologize? How could I fix it? How did one kiss make me remember?

She fell down the hill, because of me. She could’ve broken bones. She could’ve cracked her head open. She could’ve died…

Dead.

Jamie.

Charlie.

I’m so sorry.

That night I ran more. I ran through the woods. Fast. Faster. Hard. Harder.

Go, Tris. Run.

My feet bled.

My heart cried, slamming against my ribcage over and over again, rocking my mind, poisoning my thoughts as buried memories began to resurface. She could’ve died. It would’ve been my fault. I would’ve caused it.

Charlie.

Jamie.

No.

I pushed them down.

I fell into the pain racing through my chest. The pain was nice. It was welcomed. I deserved to hurt. No one else, only me.

I’m so sorry, Elizabeth.

My feet hurt. My heart hurt. It all hurt.

The pain felt scary, dangerous, real; it felt good. It felt so damn good in such an ugly way. God, I loved it. I loved it so much.

I fucking loved the hurt.

***

The night grew darker.

I sat in my shed, trying to figure out a way to apologize to her without her finding the need to be my friend. People like her didn’t need people like me complicating their lives.

People like me didn’t deserve friends.

Her kiss, though…

Her kiss made me remember. It had felt good to remember for a moment, but then I’d ruined it, because that’s what I did. I couldn’t get the image of Elizabeth falling down the hill out of my mind. What the hell was wrong with me?

Maybe I always ended up hurting people.

Maybe that was why I’d lost everything I cared about.

But I was only trying to get her to stop talking to me so I could avoid her getting hurt.

I shouldn’t have kissed her. But I wanted to kiss her. I needed to kiss her. I was selfish.

I didn’t leave my shed until the moon was high above me. As I stepped out, I paused and listened to the sound of…giggling?

It was coming from the woods.

I should’ve left it alone. I should’ve minded my own business. But instead, I followed the sound to find Elizabeth stumbling through the woods, laughing to herself with her fingers wrapped around a bottle of tequila.

She was pretty. And by pretty, I meant the beautiful kind of pretty. The kind of beautiful-pretty that was effortless and didn’t take much upkeep. Her blonde hair had loose waves, and she wore a yellow dress that looked almost as if it were made only for her body. I hated that I thought she was the beautiful kind of pretty, because my Jamie had been the same kind of beautiful-pretty, too.

Elizabeth kind of danced as she stumbled. A drunken waltz of sorts.

“What are you doing?” I asked, grabbing her attention.

She waltzed my way, on her tiptoes, and placed her hands on my chest. “Hi, stormy eyes.”

“Hi, brown eyes.”

She laughed again, snorting this time. She was wasted. “Brown eyes. I like that.” She bopped my nose. “Do you know how to be funny? You always seem so un-funny, but I bet you can be funny. Say something funny.”

“Something funny.”

She laughed, loud. Almost annoyingly so. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t annoying at all. “I like you. And I have no clue why, Mr. Scrooge. When you kissed me, it reminded me of my husband. Which is stupid because you’re nothing like him. Steven was sweet, almost sickeningly so. He always took care of me, and held me, and loved me. And when he kissed me, he meant it. When he pulled away from kisses, he always moved in for another. And another, like he always wanted me against him. But you, stormy eyes… When you pulled away from the kiss, you looked at me as if I was disgusting. You made me want to cry. Because you’re mean.” She stumbled backward, almost falling to the ground until my arms wrapped around her waist, pulling her to a standing position. “Hmph. Well at least you caught me this time.” She smirked.

My gut twitched when I saw the bruise against her cheek and the cut from her fall earlier. “You’re drunk.”

“No. I’m happy. Can’t you tell that I’m happy? I’m displaying all of the happy signals. I’m smiling. I’m laughing. I’m drinking and dancing merrily. Th-th-that’s what happy people do, Tristan,” she said, poking me in the chest. “Happy people dance.”

“Is that so?”

“Yyyes. I wouldn’t expect you to understand, but I’ll try to explain.” She kept slurring her words. She stepped back, took a swig from the tequila, and started to dance again. “Because when you’re drunk and dancing, nothing else matters. You’re twirling, twirling, twirling, and the air gets lighter, the sadness gets quieter, and you forget what it feels like to feel for a while.”

“What happens when you stop?”

“Oh, see, that’s the one tiny problem with dancing. Because when you stop moving”—her feet froze and she released the glass bottle from her hand, sending it crashing to the ground—“everything shatters.”

“You’re not as happy as you say you are,” I said.

“That’s only because I stopped dancing.”

Tears fell from her eyes as she started lowering herself to the broken glass. I stepped in, stopping her. “I’ll get it.”

“Your feet are bleeding,” she said. “Did the bottle cut you?”

I looked down at my feet, bruised and battered from my run. “No.”

“Well then, you just have really unfortunate, ugly feet.” I almost smiled. She definitely frowned. “I’m not feeling too good, stormy eyes.”

“Yeah, well. You drank enough tequila for a small army. Come on, I’ll get you some water.” She nodded once before bending over and vomiting all over my feet. “Or you know, just throw up on me.”

She giggled as she wiped her hand against her mouth. “I think that’s karma for you being rude to me. Now we’re even.”

Well, that seemed fair enough.

I carried her back to my house right after the vomit incident. After I washed my feet in the hottest water known to mankind, I found her sitting on my living room couch, staring around at my place. Her eyes were still heavily drunk. “Your house is boring. And dirty. And dark.”

“I’m glad you like what I’ve done with the place.”

“You know, you could use my lawnmower for your yard,” she offered. “Unless you were going for the whole beast’s-palace-before-he-met-beauty thing.”

“I couldn’t give two shits about my yard looking a certain way.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because unlike some, I could care less what my neighbors think of me.”

She giggled. “That means you care what people think. What you meant was you couldn’t care less what they thought.”

“That’s what I said.”

She kept giggling. “That’s not what you said.”

God, you’re annoying. And beautiful. “Well, I couldn’t care less what people think of me.”

She huffed. “Liar.”

“That’s not a lie.”

“Yes, it is.” She nodded before biting her bottom lip. “Because everyone cares what others think. Everyone cares about the opinion of others. That’s why I haven’t even been able to tell my best friend that I find my neighbor highly attractive, even though he’s an asshole. Because widows aren’t supposed to feel any kind of feelings for anyone anymore—you’re just supposed to be sad all the time. But not too sad because that makes other people super uncomfortable. So the idea of kissing someone and feeling it between your thighs, and finding that the butterflies still exist…that’s a problem. Because people would judge me. And I don’t want to be judged, because I care what they think.”

I leaned in closer to her. “I say fuck it. If you think your neighbor Mr. Jenson is hot, so be it. I know he’s like one hundred years old, but I’ve seen him do yoga in his front yard before, so I totally get your attraction to him. I think I’ve even had a tingling in between my legs for the dude.”

She burst out into a fit of laughter. “He’s not exactly the neighbor I was referring to.”

I nodded. I knew.

Her legs crossed and she sat up straight. “Do you have any wine?”

“Do I seem like the type to have wine?”

“No.” She shook her head. “You seem like the type who drinks the darkest, thickest kind of beer that grows hair on your chest.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay. I’ll take a hairy chest beer, please,” she said.

I walked out of the room and returned with a glass of water. “Here, drink up.”

She reached for the glass, but her hand landed against my forearm, and she left it there as she studied my tattoos. “They’re all children’s books.” Her fingernail traced Charlotte’s Web. “Your son’s favorites?”

I nodded.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Thirty-three. You?”

“Twenty-eight. And how old was your son when he…?”

“Eight,” I said coldly as her lips turned down.

“That’s not fair. Life isn’t fair.”

“Nobody ever said it was.”

“Yeah…but we still all hope it is.” She kept her eyes on the tattoos, traveling up to Katniss Everdeen’s bow and arrow. “Sometimes I hear you, you know. Sometimes I hear you shouting in your sleep at night.”

“Sometimes I hear you cry.”

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Yes.”

“Everyone in town expects me to be the same girl I was before Steven died. But I don’t know how to be that girl anymore. Death changes things.”

“It changes everything.”

“I’m sorry I called you a monster.”

“It’s okay.”

“How? How is that okay?”

“Because that’s how death changed me, it made me a monster.”

She pulled me closer, making me kneel in front of her. Her fingers ran through my hair, and she stared deep into my eyes. “You’re probably going to be mean to me again tomorrow, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so.”

“But I won’t mean it.”

“I thought that, too.” Her finger ran against my cheek. “You’re beautiful. You’re a beautiful, broken kind of monster.”

My finger grazed against her bruised face. “Does it hurt?”

“I’ve felt worse pain.”

“I’m so sorry, Elizabeth.”

“My friends call me Liz, but you made it pretty clear that we are not friends.”

“I don’t know how to be a friend anymore,” I whispered.

She closed her eyes and placed her forehead to mine. “I’m really good at being a friend. If you ever want me to, I can give you a few pointers.” She sighed, lightly pressing her lips to my cheek. “Tristan.”

“Yes?”

“You kissed me earlier.”

“I did.”

“But why?” she asked.

My fingers moved to the back of her neck, and I slowly pulled her closer to me. “Because you’re beautiful. You’re a beautiful, broken kind of woman.”

She smiled wide, and her body shook slightly. “Tristan?”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to throw up again.”

***

Her head had been in the toilet for over an hour now, and I stood behind her, holding her hair up. “Drink some water,” I said, handing her the glass sitting on the sink.

She sat back and took a few sips. “Normally I’m better at this drinking thing.”

“We’ve all had these kinds of nights.”

“I just wanted to forget for a while. To let go of everything.”

“Trust me,” I said, sitting across from her. “I know what that’s like. How are you feeling?”

“Dizzy. Silly. Stupid. Sorry about, you know, vomiting on your toes.”

I smirked. “Karma, I guess.”

“Was that a smile? Did Tristan Cole just smile at me?”

“Don’t get used to it,” I joked.

“Dangit. Too bad. It’s kind of nice.” She went to stand up and I followed her movements. “Your smile was the highlight of my day.”

“What was your dark moment of the day?” I asked.

“Your frown.” She exhaled as her eyes locked with mine. “I should get going. But thank you for controlling my drunkenness.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, with a thickness in my throat. “I’m sorry for making you fall earlier.”

She pressed her fingers to her lips. “It’s okay. I already forgave you.”

She headed back toward her house, much more sober, but still moving on her tiptoes. I made sure she made it inside the house before I headed to bed. When we both got to our bedrooms, we took a few moments to stand by our windows and stare at each other.

“You felt it, too, didn’t you?” she whispered across to me, speaking of our kiss.

I didn’t reply, but yeah.

I felt it.