Letting Go
He walked past her again. It almost felt like he was walking through her. She cried out to him, begged him to stop, but this was going to be another day of the silent treatment.
He slammed the door and headed to work. She stood at the window, watching him back away down the driveway in his new truck. He refused to talk to her about the purchase; he just showed up one day several weeks ago, the dealer sticker still in the window.
He hadn't spoken to her in over a month.
She looked out at the neighborhood. It had gotten to be fall without her even realizing that the weather had cooled. Leaves gathered in silent blankets, warming the earth.
She felt a chill, and went back to bed.
______________
She'd been sleeping more, lately. It was unusual for her, but she'd somehow slipped into a deeper darkness than she'd ever experienced. She'd been depressed before, but this was different; black days didn't begin to describe it. She'd sleep, she'd awaken. He'd ignore her as they watched television, when she actually joined him downstairs.
Most nights, he'd fall asleep on the couch, a highball glass with remnants of an ice cube giving testimony to how he'd spent another one of his evenings. The empty Glenlivet bottles were lined up in a windowsill.
The ghostly green was absurdly beautiful in the setting sun.
One night, seized with a frustration that words wouldn't cure, she grabbed one of those empties and flung it at the wall.
Finally, he looked in her direction, eyes bleary, a gasp on his lips and a trembling tumbler in his hand.
A rorschach of whiskeystains colored the offwhite sheetrock. Little divots formed where the bottle struck and shattered; verdant shards rained to the hardwood. A glass garden bloomed on the kitchen floor.
She didn't speak, but wailed tears of sorrow, anger, and sadness.
She was angry at mourning the loss of the two of them; she was angrier at his apparent lack of concern for their love slipping away.
He just looked at that rorsharch on the wall. A study of himself, painted in single malt.
She went back upstairs, crying herself to sleep.
______________
Winter came, and nothing improved between them. He started missing work some days, and those bottles began to line the floor beneath the window.
She refused to clean up after him.
She sat down in the chair opposite the couch one day when he slept past his alarm. She reached out to turn off the television, but it smoked and smouldered under her fingertips, and it died on its own. She snatched her hand back, expecting a shock, but she felt nothing. Where it had been blasting on about some winter storm on the Weather Channel, now there was only silence and the smell of ozone.
She just sighed.
One more thing gone wrong.
She tried to wake him, but he wouldn't stir.
She couldn't remember the last time he'd slept in the bed with her. His only trips upstairs were to dress, and even those stopped when he moved everything he needed into the guestroom.
She was a heavy sleeper, and the depression she'd slunk into forced her to stay in bed most days.
"We need help, babe." She said, hoping he'd engage her.
He just rolled over, curled away from her, shivered, and continued to sleep on the couch.
"I'm going to leave if we don't try to fix this."
Nothing. He reached for his blanket on the back of the couch, still sleeping.
She knew it was a lie. Despite all this darkness, she loved him still.
______________
Time was a slippery thing to her in her depressions.
When the snow began to melt, the man from the bank came. She refused to open the door, but looked out the peephole at him. He left an orange flyer above the knocker.
She went back to sleep, and the tears took away the worry.
She awakened to the ear-splitting noise of reversing alarms on a truck.
A Uhaul sat in the front yard, but she was too tired, too sad, to care anymore.
She slept again.
______________
When she awakened, everything in the house outside of her bedroom was gone. Echoes greeted her creaking steps down the stairs, and she cried out in fear, in shock, and in such incredible, aching remorse that she felt her heart shatter just as a windowpane above the kitchen sink did.
He'd left her bedroom, and moved out around her.
She collapsed in the living room in a heap, wails filling the air and blackness coloring her world.
______________
She felt like she was being torn apart.
Sleep disappeared, and dreams were replaced with the sound of Latin being spoken downstairs.
Latin?
It echoed throughout the emptiness of the house below her. Inside, she ached. Physical pain tore through her, and she screamed, despite trying to listen.
The Latin stopped, and the clinching in her gut relaxed.
She stumbled to the stairway, and looked down into the living room.
Strangers gathered, surrounding a priest.
He looked at her.
At her. He smiled.
It was the first real contact she'd had since...
And memory flooded her.
______________
Images of she and her husband.
He was driving, she was holding his hand.
They were just going to the store; a beautifully mundane ritual.
He said something and she laughed.
And then it happened.
______________
The priest spoke to her.
"Hello, Melanie."
She didn't reply.
"These are the Murchisons. They own this house now. They asked me to bless it before they move your bedroom out, and they move their family in."
"Mine," she managed to croak, tears flowing.
She noticed the couple cringe, and the man, Mr. Murchison, she presumed, shivered. They were young; they reminded of her of how she and her husband looked back when.
"GET OUT!" she managed to yell, voice cracking through tears.
The young woman began to cry.
The priest just continued to smile, and he took a step closer.
"Melanie. You need to go Home. You need to let go of this place."
The Latin resumed, and the last thing she heard:
"Go with God, Melanie."
"Amen."
And she let go.
The house disappeared from around her, and sadness was a distant whisper.
______________
A tractor trailer blew through the red light.
It hit the passenger side of the car at somewhere around fifty miles an hour.
As the noise died away, so did she.