Forever & Always

The world is white.

The winter frost is cold and biting and our faces are stained red as though we’re drunk. She’s not, I assume, as she’s been nursing her drink for the past half hour while her eyes water. The wind is bitter, and yet we trudge along.

She talks and I listen. Something about organic chemistry and Hess’s Law, and I remember it from way back when. When the worksheets piled up, and my grades were impeccable, and I was merely fifteen. Ah the wondrous age of fifteen.

College life was dull, but nothing compared to home. My father was a teacher while my mother was lead in financial services. Mother worked from home and was always on the phone. Cooked, cleaned, hoped for release and never got it. My father worked hours away. He left at sunrise and arrived home at sunset, his forehead creased, his wire glass frames slipping off the peak of his nose. Usually exhausted, he was never up to conversation. Not when I won some award or the other, not when I graduated highschool at 16. Not when I fell in love, and moved three thousand miles away. Not when my mother passed away. It’s alright. He was tired and exhausted. The funeral was a quiet ordeal with seven people. I packed for three days after while my father drank himself into oblivion. I moved on that Saturday.

”...and that’s why Hess’s law is the epitome of Chemistry and all its ideologies! I mean could you believe it when Professor Summers even attempted to contradict that statement? I swear sometimes the T.A. is better, and that poor thing looks like a deer caught in headlights ninety percent of the time, dontcha think?”

Dr. Summers is an idiot. I voice the certain opinion, and Carol laughs. Her teeth shimmers the color of the snow glistening around us, her nose the color of her bright wool scarf. We knitted them together last winter, when Carol turned twenty one. She was invited elsewhere, a pub, to grab drink with her graduate friends. I couldn’t go, so neither did she. We drank cider and knit till our teeth rotted and we ran out of yarn. I think that’s when it all started. Damn scarves.

I can see it. The building looms over the garden; an ugly spot in the midst of a winter wonderland. All good things come to an end I suppose. Carol hasn’t stopped chippering but then that wasn’t anything new. She looked up, her long eyelashes coated in snow fluff, and lifted her heels on to her tiptoes. I looked down, brought my hands up to cup her jaw, and leaned down. She whispered into my lips, and the world slowed down. The ice and snow thawed, and somewhere below us the devil was smiling. Laughing. Rolling on the floor with tears in his eyes. It was just you and me up against the world. And we were happy, oh so happy.

I love you.

So why?

Why as the memory fades, and the ghost of your lips leave mine, am I alone again? As you rest there, with you eyes closed and not a care in the word. As the room closes in, and the nurses come and go again. Why?

I love you, forever and always.

It’s white again. Oh, so white.

@demcmurphy