2019-07-11 - Letting Go

The bedsheets were still wrinkled from when Lucy last slept here. Nearly two years later, and Logan had never come back up here to make the bed. He thought the sheets would hold onto her scent forever, that smoothing out the wrinkles would somehow make her memory disappear. And so this place, their place, had become a shrine - a single, perfectly preserved memory, of the last time Lucy Miller was alive. There lies the t-shirt she wore to bed before that fateful evening, strewn across the armchair and now covered in a faint sprinkling of dust. Over there find the perfume bottles where the liquid has long since evaporated, leaving oil stains upon the glass. In the closet find her clothes, all her clothes, somehow uneaten by moths. Pieces of her were here, pieces of her were everywhere. But Lucy Miller has long since gone.

It took him nearly a week to work up the courage to come up to the loft, to peel open the door he'd kept under lock and key. By now, he'd put the rest of his life in cardboard boxes, most which would be sent to storage up in Tacoma. In the front yard, a 'FOR SALE' sign hangs. The realtor promised it would go quick; she thankfully kept to herself that morbid curiousity would bring in buyers. In another week, Logan would put this house in his rear-view mirror, and he'd put the future for him and Emily and this other person in front of him. This other person. Their other person.

Empty cardboard boxes want to be filled, but Logan sits on the bed with Lucy's shirt clasped in his hand. He tries to smell her on the collar, but she's not there anymore. It's funny how the tears don't come when they should, like in this moment, when he feels no joy but feels some relief when all that fills his nose is the scent of dust. He holds onto the fabric for one more minute, before he tosses the shirt into the box marked 'DONATE'.

"I'm still here," comes a voice behind him, and there's the sparkle of sunlight in the corner of his eye, a glimpse of red hair. A quiet laugh on the wind. "Why would you throw me away? You don't love her more than me, do you?" And he doesn't, but it's different. What he feels for Emily now rooted itself a long time ago, and was molded through time. Through shared experiences, through grief and tragedy, through imperfections. She'd seen him at the lowest of his lows, and she picked him up when he was pieces on the floor. And with Emily, he'd experienced the highest of his highs. But it didn't mean he loved Lucy any less; she'd always be the sun to him. But he's found a new center of the world he thought was broken forever.

"You can stay. She can go. Or you can throw her down the stairs. We could be a family. We could be here forever, you said you'd be here forever."

He lumbers to his feet. Behind him, that little ball of sunlight grows brighter; but it dims when he picks up an armful of clothes from the closet and shoves them in the 'DONATE' box. "Don't go" says the sunshine. "This is the only place you need. I'm the only one who really loves you." He goes to the dresser, and flips open the lid to the jewelry box. A ballerina pops up and starts to sway, tinkling music filling the room. But he doesn't look at the box. Instead, he does the one thing Logan has never done - he turns, and he looks directly into the sun. Just this once, he needs to see, because he needs to see what he is leaving behind.

But there is nothing. No red hair, no sunshine. No Lucy. Just a slip of a shadow chased away by the real sun outside, breaking free of the clouds in that moment to cast golden rays through the window. "It was never you, was it?" he asks the room. The room does not respond.

When he turns back to the jewelry box, there's a slip of paper inside. A page of a book, torn out and folded thin. It sits above the pretty trinkets that Logan's gotten Lucy over the years, and he slowly opens it. The words are tiny, small print, a single stanza of a poem:

Miss me a little - but not too long
And not with your head bowed low
Remember the love that we once shared
Miss me .... but let me go

The tears never come when they should. He reads the poem twice over, and feels nothing but relief. He folds the paper back the way it was, and slips it into his pocket, and then puts the jewelry box in the container marked 'KEEP'. Little by little, the room is packed away, until everything that once was Lucy lays in cardboard, and the bed that she slept in last is made.

He lingers in the doorway for a moment longer, focuses on the stained glass with the goose in flight. "I love you, Luce," he says to the room, to the ghost that was never really there. "But I gotta let you go." He leaves the door open as he heads down the stairs, and goes to make Emily some lunch.