blackwater
I wake up gasping for air.
the room is dark, though it must be morning. a weak, colorless light presses itself against the curtains and fails to enter. rain has been falling for days, and I can hear it gathering in the broken mouth of the drainpipe outside.
not so fast as the water gathering in my tired eyes, though. countless tears have rolled down my temples way before the raindrops started dripping steadily onto the stone floor below.
she doesn’t love me.
the house has been quiet for a long time. it doesn’t sleep, not exactly, but it waits. it feels like it has always been waiting.
the water moves through its walls with the patience of something searching for a way in. at night, I hear it behind the wallpaper — a soft wet shifting. in the morning, there are new stains on the ceiling.
“you deserve all the love in the world.”
even yours?
I look at the place where I am — the empty shells of the last years of my life, and the ones yet to come. the wind presses its cold hands against the windows, causing the glass to shudder in its frame. there is a dead moth on the sill, its wings open as though it had been trying to become a flower. on the dresser, a glass of water sits untouched beside a hairbrush tangled with strands of hair too long to be mine.
and then I try to think of her life: her house, her family, her friends. the ordinary existence of all the things that belong to her. I try to place myself somewhere inside it — a chair at a table, a name in a conversation, a photograph kept in the back of a drawer.
I cannot, but these thoughts have become familiar. they have worn a small hollow inside me.
I press my fingers against my chest, as if the touch could make my heart hold my feelings. the skin at my fingertips has gone pale and soft. a thin line of water runs from my wrist to my elbow, and I wipe my hand against the sheet.
the fabric darkens.
I imagine her waking up. the soft click of a kettle. a lamp lit in a warm room. a man calling her name from another part of the house. the small movements of her day.
if I were to disappear, nothing would change. and, if it did, it would be for the better.
that’s not a sharp realization — it does not hurt the way I expected it to. perhaps grief becomes something else when it has nowhere left to go.
the house exhales around me. something knocks from inside the wall.
I sit up.
the sound comes again. three soft knocks, patient and close. the wallpaper beside the bed swells outward, and a dark shape moves beneath it, slow as a hand dragged through water. the plaster cracks along the ceiling.
I find myself unable to look away.
a black stain spreads from it in the shape of roots. one of them reaches down the wall, stopping just above my pillow.
I have seen it before — or I have dreamed of it. there’s little difference.
I look down at myself. the skin of my legs is thin enough that I can see something dark pulsing underneath, but it feels too cold to be blood. it rises and falls slowly, following the rhythm of the pipes.
at my ankle, a small patch of mould has flowered beneath the skin: pale threads, soft and white, opening into a bruise-coloured bloom. I press my thumb against it, and the flesh gives way. cold water beads at the surface.
oh no, I think, but not because I’m surprised. because I have known.
not in words. not in a way I could touch. but somewhere beneath the waiting, beneath the distance, beneath the careful work of making myself small enough not to be missed — I have known.
but why, then?
why let me remember? why let me know she exists in this lifetime? why let me find her if she is only ever out of reach? will I never be whole again?
why?
then I hear someone crying.
I move toward the sound. the floorboards don’t answer beneath my feet. my legs drag behind me, heavy with water. something pulls at the skin of my calves from the inside, and by the time I reach the window, thin roots have threaded themselves around my ankles.
outside, the world is drowned in mist. the yew trees stand dark and still along the path. beyond them, the iron gates lean open, their hinges furred with rust.
she stands at the edge of the garden, but I almost don’t recognise her.
her hair is shorter. silver catches in it when she lowers her head. her coat is dark with rain, and she holds a bundle of flowers wrapped in paper gone soft. she looks older than I remember her — older in the way houses are older: altered by weather, carrying their years in every surface.
for one impossible second, I think she has come for me.
then she kneels, placing the flowers at the base of a stone. yellow flowers, the kind I once told her I loved. as the mist shifts, my eyes follow her hands — and I look down to see my own grave.
it’s half swallowed by the moss. my name has been worn thin by time, but it is still there.
I pound against the window in my despair, but there is no use. my fists sink into the glass up to the elbows. it feels warm and wet around my arms. perhaps memory is only another room in this house, and I have been wandering through it so long that I no longer know the way out.
she says something.
“I’m sorry.”
the words reach me not through the air, but through the walls, the floorboards, the earth beneath the house. and I want to tell her that she does not have to be sorry, and that I never meant to make a home out of a place where I did not belong.
but she cannot hear me.
she rests her hand against the stone. for a moment, the house seems to hold its breath with me. then she stands and walks away through the mist, and I watch until the trees close behind her black.
the house is quiet again, except for my sobs.
one last time, I try to think of the place where I am — and I stay where I don't leave a trace.
below the window, the flowers begin to rot.
