Fortitude

Their marriage was a failure in the eyes of some…well… most people. They never spoke about what they were thinking. About what they wanted. He was always gone and she was always unavailable. No one knew the reason they wed, not even them. She liked to think it was because they were both shaken trees in the middle of the storm holding each other up with broken branches. Beat up but still there for one another. Those words were even in her vows. She meant them. He kept his thoughts to himself. He didn’t mean to. They shared a bed, but she liked the couch more. She couldn’t handle the whispering in their room. She thought it was the ghost of their love trying to sneak back into their hearts, at least into hers. “Why should I let you in? I don’t want to get hurt again,” she said to the spirit of what was once something good, something healthy.

A cold, harsh wind swept through the window, and she felt something eerily familiar. She loathed that feeling. Just as quietly as that breeze swept past her face, so did memories of sleepless nights and strange sensations of grief and guilt. Suppressed, but just like her, somehow, someway, still living and breathing misery. She rose from her place on the couch and stumbled over to her room, not quite awake. She went there for something, she knew it. She never goes in there to sleep. Not anymore. The whispers returned, and breathed an utterance of importance into her ear. A burst of energy awoke in her and she began to look through every drawer and every cabinet in her solemn chamber. “Fortitude,” brushed past the back of her eyes like Bunny’s blue ribbon and through her ears like a soft lullaby to a newborn child. Swiftly and carelessly, she ran to their backyard, to Fortitude, the little shed they built when they first married. It was more like she sat in the background reading a book aloud as he hammered and drilled scraps of wood and metal together. It held.

Her favorite books were stashed in the little shack, and his most beloved records were hidden somewhere in it, too. She wasn’t looking for any of that. She scrambled around the shed and rearranged and dismantled every cabinet in it to find what she knew would make the whispers leave, to find what they were leading her to.

The letters were buried under a mess of pipes and garbage. He must have left it there before he left. She shook at the sight of it, and considered leaving it all there, and staying with the miserable memories that plagued her every so often, but leaving those wretched reminders there. She even considered breaking Fortitude back to the scraps she came from. As she leaned out of the doorway, a wave of tears engulfed her. Quickly, she turned and braced herself to tear away at the trash in front of her to get to the treasure. She shook the dirt and junk off the notebook of papers and pictures and sat unknowingly in the filth.

“Are you still afraid of the dark?” She began to laugh as she read, with tears in her eyes, the first line of the letter he had written her all those years ago. “Of course I am,” she started “but you always protected me from it.” “It’s ok if you are,” the letter read, “I am too. Not because I don’t know what’s there, but because I don’t know what’s missing.” Her laugh faded and a frown took its place. “I don’t know if you’ll leave. Then I’m afraid of the sun. I get scared that when it rises and shines through our window the next morning, your smile won’t shine along with it.” “It did” she commenced. “It will. Just come back!” she let out as tears began to stream down her rose colored cheeks. “But then I think of the memories we made, and I’m not afraid anymore,” she read aloud. “But I am,” she answered. “I’m not afraid because you’re always in my mind. Your name is always on my tongue. I’m not afraid because I know you’ll always live as long as I don’t forget. So don’t forget me, and I’ll always live.” She held on to that part, and she kept Fortitude in place.