Cold-Blooded Beautiful (26 page)

Monday night

Okay, I’ll bloody try it for real.  Thoughts. Keyboard.  Go.

“Write clear and hard about what hurts.” Ernest Hemingway

Do you know what heartbreak teaches you?

When it tears at you for years?

That you’re strong.

Solid.  Real.

Thomas, I know you’re in Hell, not giving a fuck, probably took over the damn place.  But guess what?  I found something beautiful, someone so beautiful inside that she erases everything that you are and what you’ve done.  She pours herself inside me and I drink her in greedily.

I’ve been stupidly thinking today of what my life would have been like if I’d never met the waitress with the beautiful green eyes.  Numbing darkness.  She is not my past; she’s my future.  Something pure and good to hold onto after the cold grasp of your claws left me for dead.

Tuesday

Today I stared in the mirror for far too fucking long.  The eyes that she says she loves are only dull gray English skies to me.  I’m pale and broken and I wonder how it is that she could ever find any worth inside of me.  How could she be able to crawl into my arms every night and find solace in their flawed strength?  The mirror shatters, of course by my hand, my reflection splinters into thousand of tiny parts, and I linger in their pieces.  I shift them about with my hands to find the broken pieces that belong and those that I should discard.  And the only thing that remains are the cold gray eyes that look at her.

Wednesday

She has this little cluster of freckles on the back of her thigh.

She probably doesn’t know it but that’s my favorite place on her body.

Today I watched her hand out hot cocoa to an entire floor of children in the children’s ward.  For no reason, other than she had the time.  She didn’t see me, standing in the background, as she lit up the world with her special sort of shine.  She laughed full open mouth laughs surrounded by kids with eyes that sparkled with delight yet bodies riddled with sickness.  But she saw in them beauty and hope to heal.  She met me in her office, smile across her lips, not a stitch of makeup on and all I could do was grab her and kiss her, devour the lips that smiled so hard despite watching the suffering.  And when I touched her, I can see it so clearly, our future.  Fingers entwined.  Both of us sitting on the stone patio, the summer breeze smelling of barbeque and suntan lotion, a gaggle of children and dogs running in circles past our lounging feet.  I see with her a life I never thought I would ever have.

Thursday

Today felt like England.

Gray stormy skies and the forever drizzle of icy rain.

A melancholy wave of sadness filtered in instead of the warm rays of the sun.  Shrink says I’m depending too much on Samantha for my stability.  But isn’t that how it should be?  Should we not depend on the ones we love to find our strength? No, he said, you need to do this on your own.  Fuck the fuck off, I said back.  Politely, I might add.  What does he know of us?  We’ve spent too much time apart already while the sheriff’s office set up her new life, I don’t want to miss another minute more.  Those two months were silent for me, the only thing I did was talk with him and have insane fucked up fictitious conversations with a dead sixteen-year-old boy who once tried to kill me.  There’s nothing left to say to him.  Dead is Dead.  Life is for the living and I want to start living.

Friday

I fell in love with her even more today.  Just this morning.  Walking into the kitchen, tired itchy eyes, yawn splitting open my face.  She was in front of the stove.  Back to me.  One of my long buttoned up shirts fell to the middle of her thighs, the collar slung casually over a soft shoulder.  A spatula in one hand, coffee in the other, her delicate feet wrapped in those heavy furry socks.  The bloody brilliant ones with the zombie eyeballs all over them.  Turning to face me, she wore a streak of pancake batter across her cheek, and a bit of the powdered mix on the tip of her nose.  ‘Pancakes?’ she asked.  I answered her with ‘forever,’ because I was thinking of how long I wanted to keep her.  She somehow knew what I meant.  She knew what I needed.  Slowly she shut the stove and pulled me to the table, I followed her sexy smile and those sage green eyes.  She lifted herself on the edge of the table and wrapped those perfect legs around me.  The cold granite beneath my palms and her thighs, the clanking of dishes and her whispered moans.  Arching her back across the table, taking me in. 

Sunday

I used to find solace at the bottom of a bottle.

Yet it never lasted long, in a blink it would be gone.

Now I find it in the strangest of places.

Places I never thought it would be.

The crock of her eyes when she laughs.

The curl of her lips when she smiles.

The curve of her thighs as they embrace me.

The heat of her flesh when I crawl inside.

Tuesday

Sixteen years is far too long to be angry.

If I could have met her then.

Two teens with angst you could feel.

I’d be more of a force.

And no one would have ever touched her.

But me.

Wednesday

She’s strolling through the woods,

Breath in icy mists.

Snow crunching beneath her boots,

Crimson streaked on her winter cheeks.

She laughs and looks up.

The sun blinds her eyes.

The way she blinds mine.

And I borrow her smile for a moment.

Try it on for size.

And find, to my surprise,

It’s a bloody perfect fit.

After two hours of reading aloud to her, I noticed a small twitch of her fingers. It made me breathless.  Heat tingled across my chest, and my body felt light, weightless.  “Jen! Jen!  I just saw her bloody twitch her fingers,” I yelped.

“Really?” Jen asked, moving closer to the bed.  “It could be something or nothing, though.  You have to keep this up though, because this is good for the both of you.  But, let me read some stuff to her and talk to her, take a break.  Get coffee, your voice is getting weird.”

I knew Jen wanted to read to her also, so for once, I didn’t put up a fight, and went down for coffee and let them spend a few moments together.  When I met the doctor on call in the hallway and told him about the finger movement, he just offered me a tight-lipped smile.  “Yes, yes,” he chirped, “could be an involuntary movement.  We’ll be taking her for a CT scan in an hour.”

Doctor Douche and Doom.  Bloody wanker. I crushed my coffee cup in my hand, spilling it all over the floor.  My thoughts weren’t straight.  They were muddled and thick, just tipping over the borderline to rage.  Yet, my own thoughts stopped me from plunging headfirst into viciousness. All I thought about, all I wanted to do was run in and tell Sam about the coffee.  Crushing it and spilling it all over the floor.  She would have reprimanded me for wasting the nectar of the gods. Then she would have laughed at me and told me some crazy story about what it might be like for a surgeon to have to tell a family their loved one was not waking up.  How that surgeon’s brain was churning and spinning a thousand thoughts in his head to try to help his patient, all while dealing with his own bloody problems and not having a meal for twelve hours straight.  I could hear her voice say the words in my head, the ones that calmed me down, and let me breathe.  God, how she changed me so that I could do it myself.

Dragging myself back to the cafeteria, I ordered two coffees.  One was for me, and the other was a caramel flavored one so I could stick it near her nose and oxygen.  I know inside there, somewhere, she was bloody dying to have a coffee.

Jen was singing some crazy boy band song when I walked back into the ICU.  “You are seriously going to crack the equipment in here if you keep that high-pitched wailing up,” I said. 
I had never heard such bloody wailing
. 

“Yeah, well I was hoping to hear her complain about it, not you,” she replied.  “What have you been reading to her in here anyway?”

“Just a few entries from my journal.  They’re mostly about her.  I figured if she knew I couldn’t live without her, she’d fight harder to wake up.”

Jen’s lips moved to speak, then stopped.

“Don’t.  Jen.  Don’t tell me she’s not going to wake up from this, okay?  Because if she’s doesn’t, you can bury us together.   I go where she goes.”

“Oh, Kade…”

“Sod off,” I snapped.  My fingers clenched together tightly and just as I was about to start a tirade, the neurosurgeon strolled in.   Ignoring us both, he walked past and pushed his glasses up the long thin bridge of his nose.  From out of his pocket, he pulled a thin medical flashlight, yanked open Samantha’s eyelids and shined the light right on them.  Those emerald green irises just about blinded me, but what made my heart stop was watching her pupils shrink and react to the light.

Jen’s voice whispered into my ear, “He’s checking her pupillary reflex to see if her pupils constrict.  Before, when you went out for coffee, they checked her gag reflex, she gagged and coughed.” 

The surgeon wrote a bunch of unidentifiable scratches and crap on her chart, clickety-clicked his pen and left.  Jen slumped down in a seat and hung her head in her hands.  Fuck everybody.  I was going to read to her my words, everything she’d ever made me feel until she woke the fuck up.

And I did, everyday for seven straight days.  I read to her as her bruises slowly faded, her hair became shiny with oil and she lost so much weight that her cheeks looked sunken in.  I read to her for hours at a time.  For days, until my throat turned dry and my voice rotted into a hoarse raspy shadow of what it once was.  I wasn’t ever going to stop.  Ever.

Tuesday

My thoughts, my feeling, my fucking heart is tied to the posts of my bed.

Captured and imprisoned.

By her.

I’ve never wanted to be held against my will until now.

She tears me down and rips me raw.

Flings the flesh of my chest open and gently lays her lips to my heart.

It beats for her.

It bleeds for her.

She made it feel again.

Made it all mean something again.

She found me under all the rubble.

Beneath the waste and the debris that was piled atop of me.

And she grabbed my hand and helped me stand up again.

Helped me live again.

Wednesday

I sat on the stiff grass; sharp spikes of icy green and I dug my fingertips into the frozen earth.  I’m in the yard, my house, my tomb stands high above me.  Her soft voice drifts through an open window, she is singing in the shower.  I could almost hear the beads of water falling against her skin.  Almost taste the salt as she washes it away to lather with apple and cinnamon.  My hands tighten their hold of the earth not to rush in their with her.  But the soil just crumbled through my fingers and broke along the cold ground.  Suddenly, I’m up, running.  Over the frost, crunching my boots in the snow.  Through the door and straight into the bathroom.  The door is never locked, because she knows. She knows I’d always need her and she would never lock herself away from me.  Then I’m standing, fully clothed in the steam, drops of water soaking my shirt, my pants, and my boots.  Mud and snow twirling and spinning over the drain and she laughs.   Her beautiful, perfect laugh.  Her hands cup my face, warm and wet.  Her lips meet mine and I’m hers.  She’s mine.  Up against the cold stone tiles, sopping wet pants around my ankles, she’s mine. 

On day four, I saw a small wiggle of her toe.  I continued to read to her.  My notes. My thoughts.  My feelings.  Everything.

Saturday

Doctor Headshrinker, he bloody hates the name I’ve chosen for him, keeps repeating that I need to spend more time on my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and not my obsession with Samantha.  Why the fuck would I want to do that?  He mentioned to me this journal was supposed to be an ongoing way to communicate with Thomas, the dead kid who left me to die in a classroom.

Really, I have nothing more to say to him.

Fuck you, I won.

I lived, you little bloody bitch.

And know I can feel the sun shine on my face.  I can feel the warmth on my skin, because my sun, she sleeps besides me.  Every night.  Fuck you Thomas.  And fuck you Mr. Psychotherapist.  I don’t need pills; all I need is Sam.

On day five, I watched as she made a full fist with her right hand, and then her left.  I read more.  I read faster.  The doctor’s said it might be all we could hope for, that she may never do anything more
.  No.  Fuck them
.  I will deal with whatever she gives me.  If she stays like this, she’ll come home like this, and I will read to her every day.  If she opens her eyes and has to learn to eat and walk again, then I’ll be right by her side teaching and helping her.  I will not give up on her.

“I’ll read you one from this week, love.”

Will I speak her eulogy before a crowd?  Will the words stick to my tongue and tangle in tears? Will her apparition crawl into bed with me each night?  Haunting me with scents and fluttery caresses. Meet me in my bed around midnight okay? Just run right in, full-speed, and send me into complete shock, or make my heart burst.  Just take me with you, if you decide to leave.