2020-02-18 - I Still

The text came in sometime past ten o'clock in the evening and despite her present position, lying cheek-down on her own bed and staring at the red numbers of her digital alarm clock, some semblance of life stirred from her battered, aching body at the caller ID that fluttered over her smartphone's LCD screen. Swollen, puffy eyes found the message as it lingered on her screen, her face half-illuminated by its harsh, glaring light:

I still love you.

It had come in a series of other messages, warnings about some Veil creature that had threatened to rip her chest open and tear out her heart as a prize, but everything else barely elicited a rection with the exception of those small, simple words that illustrated an ultimately paltry sketch of how they were together. She tried to muster every thread of outrage, every glowing bit of anger - something, anything, to return some much needed energy back into her body to at least throw the phone away and will her covers to swallow her up. In the end, all she did was curl with the near-empty bottle of scotch in her grip and stared at the device with its message until its automatic sleep mode triggered, and everything went dark again.

The tears, themselves, amounted to very little; they trickled over now and then, but it was nothing like the deluge she had inundated him with after he forced his arms around her the week she had accidentally read her mother's own murder, refusing to let her go no matter how hard she fought and screamed to get away from him and spurred by her abject refusal to be held when she felt especially vulnerable. Remembering him in that way while the wounds were so fresh was always a slippery slope, pitching and falling into other more recent memories, concluding with the devastating image of him letting go of life and everything else that mattered, content to get lost in the Far Place so long as he disappeared with her.

It wasn't as if she wanted to get mad because the words weren't true, or even because they were. Alexander Clayton was many things, but he wasn't a liar.

But it was hard not to remember her own words, last said in fury, and agony, and misery at this new, fresh failure, and how they smashed uselessly against the buttressed walls of him. Did they even make a dent, or a single scratch? Did they even register? How was it fair, to watch her own fall, broken on impact and crushed by rushing feet at his frantic egress, while his own felt like a knife through the ribs?

This was the one thing you could never let happen, with him. You knew it after he told you everything. All that foresight, with no real ability to preempt anything. What good are you, really?

Isabella continued watching her phone's darkened screen, the after image of those four words burned in her retinas - that trick human eyes did, on occasion, when too-bright fell into too-dark quickly.

She had addressed his other concerns instead, kept the conversation short if not for his sake. It had been a few hours ago, but some part of her hated herself anyway for hanging her hopes on these four little words, this internal betrayal of her more ferocious self when all it could remember was how he couldn't get away from her fast enough.

Finally, her lips parted, feeling them crack from the unforgivable dryness of the winter. "I still love you," she whispered towards the phone, the words brimming with pain and heat.

But she didn't send them. How could she, now, when they could never reach their intended recipient?

And after remembering the faces of the ones she had lost, maybe she was never capable of conveying them in a way that could.