2019-03-18 - This Little Light of Mine

Logan should know better than to think that he could have an entire nice day. Moments pass too quickly, slipping like water through his fingertips no matter how hard he tries to hold onto them. Eventually, bodies untangle and heat dissipates; eventually, moments like these are gone. Not completely though; she's scratched memories into his him and stained his skin with the scent of her own. She's left her own impression there on the scars of his broken heart, dents that would ache at the most inopprotune moments in time. But he has to get up at some point. And so eventually, he picks himself up out of bed and picks his clothes up off the floor, and makes his way upstairs without the stairs creaking under his weight.

In the kitchen, there is a drawer with a false bottom. It's there that he goes, to palm a memory from its depths. A photograph of a redhead in a white wedding dress, her arms around another redhead in pale robin egg blue. They embrace outside of a church, and they smile for the camera and for the moment. Logan does not look at it until he's outside on the back porch, easing himself into the swing beneath the awning. Beyond, in the backyard, the rain falls in fat, sloppy drops, but he's safe from the wet here. He built this swing for her, for Lucy - it was the first thing that he did when they moved into the house. Now, the chains squeak when he sets the swing into gentle motion, breathing out a heavy sigh as he casts his eyes down to the photograph.

With the very tip of his thumb, he traces the curve of Lucy's smile while he stares down into Emily's happy eyes. He can still hear Lucy's laughter, sweet and pleasant, seconds before this photo was taken, when Emily twirled her about to show off the flair of her wedding skirt. Those giggles tickle now at the back of his mind, a nagging reminder that she was still here even though she was long gone. For a moment, he lifts his eyes up to stare at the moon where it hangs low in the trees. When his eyes settle back onto the photograph, his thumb has unconsciously moved to cover Lucy entirely, leaving only Emily to smile up at him.

Had he always felt this way about her? Desire and affection. Need. Want. Intimacy. Desperation. Everything.

No. He had been devoted to Lucy; she was the sun around which he orbitted, bringing warmth and light into his life. A light which was snuffed completely with the single slam of her head upon the hardwood of their living room floor, blanketing him in darkness. And he'd lived in the dark for days and weeks, months. A year. Emily hadn't brought the light back with her when she returned to the B&B after all this time; there'd been no shine, no light at the end of the tunnel that he was drowning in.

He keeps his finger firmly over Lucy as he stares at Emily in the photograph and lets the shame and guilt crash over him, overwhelm him. Not just because of what they did. No, he'd beat himself up for that for days and weeks and months and years. No, this was deeper still, it goes beyond a moment that was gone now even if it lives on in the scratches in his skin and the deeper, more permanent marks that she left.

Because now in the darkness,there was a light. It was a single, miniscule pinprick of a glow, distant and out of reach. But it shines.

Oh, does it shine.

And he hates himself because of it.