Numb

It was just another day. The sun rose, but it barely brightened the sky. The light coming through my window was bleak and colorless. My room was grey, just like any other day. It was just as hard to pull myself out of bed as it was yesterday, and the day before that. My pillow was damp. I was crying in my sleep again, and by the crazy arrangement of my sheets, I didn’t sit still either. I’ve been having nightmares like this for months now. It stopped worrying my friends and family a while ago. They’ve come to accept it like I have, but they didn’t go through what I had to accept it.

I crave those five days now. Every day, I wait. I go through a lackluster day of soulless existing just to experience those five days of bliss. Every day is another day closer, but it feels so much longer. I’m closer now, I know it. But I still have about five more months of waiting. Five more months of being numb.

I start my days with criticizing my appearance in the mirror. The bags under my eyes. The frizzy fly-aways on my hair. My sunken skin. I get uglier every day without him, I think to myself. It scares me sometimes. A lot of times, actually. When he finally comes back, he’ll be stronger, happier, and I’ll have turned into an old maid at only twenty-five. That is, if he actually comes back when I turn twenty-five. What if they want him to stay longer? Or worse. What if they ask for volunteers to stay longer, and he wants to? Four more years, a letter per year. How would I be able to survive that? I don’t think I would.

These days, I find it hard to even get dressed. When I do, it’s simple. Jeans and a t-shirt, or a tank top with pajama pants. I spend a lot of time on the computer, running a blog to write down every depressing feeling I have to deal with throughout the day. Sometimes people ask me questions. “How do you deal with it?” “How do you spend years without the one you love?” I don’t know how to answer them anymore. I used to just say something to inspire them, “It’s not hard when you know your love for someone can never break, no matter what you go through.” I still believe that, but I find it hard to instill that belief into others nowadays.

While sitting on my bed with my laptop as a companion, I kept staring at that top drawer of my dresser, our dresser. In our room. It saddens me that I’ve gotten out of the habit of referring to things as ours. It’s been over two years, it’s understandable by now. But it kills me. Everything that reminds me of us, or the fact that I still have about a year and a half longer to wait kills me on the inside. It’s not easy to hide, either. Everyone can see it, and they’re thankfully considerate. They put the least amount of emphasis on Austin as possible. It’s no use, though. I think about him all the time. I can never stop. Every night I read the three letters he’s sent me again. He wrote one on the plane when he was first going to his destination because he knew he’d only be able to write one each year after that. I was always afraid he’d get too tired, and one letter would read, I found someone else or I can’t do this with you anymore, I’m sorry. Luckily, they haven’t. They were always sweet, enriching. I kept them in the top drawer of our dresser underneath some unmentionables, for easy access but also so people wouldn’t stumble upon them (not that I really had company over anymore). I left the letters in the envelopes. I treasured the doodles he had scribbled across the back of each one.

Each drawing represented something inside the letter. The first one had a drawing of the back half of an airplane and a cloud covering the front. The window right before the last had a heart inside of it. His seat was in that row. He wrote about how much he would miss me, how he knew we could make it but also how he was still petrified of going four years without me. It’s funny that in my letter back to him, I was the one to calm him down. It’s hard to believe now. Now I’m the one in need of reassurance all the time. On the second envelope was a drawing of a woman standing in a field with a horse in the background. The wind was blowing her skirt, but she didn’t have a face. He replaced it with a heart. In his letter he told me a story about how when driving to work in the early morning, he passed a ranch each day. A couple days before he wrote the letter, he passed the ranch again in the morning only to see a woman standing in the field away from the barn. She looked upset, and she wore a long brown skirt, like the one I had worn on our third date. He said she looked like me, and the skirt reminded him of me. He almost crashed his car when he saw her. He never saw her again after that. On the third envelope, the last letter I received from him, he wrote the alphabet in cursive, with a heart attached at the end. In the letter, he explained that he saw a diner called “The Alphacrest Diner” and the neon title was in cursive. On the same road, he spotted a motel called “Bobby’s Motel”, with the lettering also in cursive. Every place on that road had their signs written in cursive. When he got to the end of the road, he saw the sign for the street read “Script st.” He chuckled at it, and then remembered when I wrote him love letters before we moved in together. You have the most beautiful cursive handwriting. I remember thinking about it every time I read your letters. It makes me wonder what you think of when you read mine, he wrote. In every drawing was a heart. The heart represented him or myself.

I felt the urge to go through that drawer and read his letters again, at 2:00 in the afternoon. I gave myself a rule only a couple weeks after Austin left; that I wouldn’t torture myself. While I mostly break that rule practically every day, I decided that reading his letters more than once a day would be torturing myself a little too much. So I only read them at night. Now that I think about it, that’s probably why my pillow is always wet in the morning.

I decided to emerge from my bedroom in an effort to dissipate my urges to read those letters. I slipped on a pair of bootcut jeans and a loose t-shirt over my head. I don’t know what to do with myself most of the time. I keep myself hopeful most of the day until around 5:00pm, when the mail comes. I always curse the system for making it come so late, mostly because my risen hopes have a hard downfall in the evening. The fact was that right now, I had to do something that would take up three hours but also have enough productivity to keep my mind off of Austin’s letters for a while. It would be great if I didn’t think of Austin at all for those three hours, but I knew that was wishful thinking.

I started dialing numbers on my house phone. I was calling my best friend, Jenny, who I’ve barely spoken to all week. Like I said before, it’s hard for me to do anything without Austin, so I haven’t hung out with her in a while. She sounded excited when I got her on the other line. I explained to her that I needed something to do for a couple hours and that I was driving myself insane. She knew what I was talking about. She suggested she come over and we could bake something together. I agreed. I haven’t baked anything since Austin was home.

She showed up at my door about twenty minutes later with a recipe in hand. She wore her brightest smile, which matched her cute red dress. Jenny liked to dress up for any occasion possible. We spent most of the day in the kitchen mixing and measuring, and at one point exploding confectioner’s sugar all over my counter. We laughed a lot too. The hangout did the job I wanted it to do; I barely thought about Austin’s letters. I still thought about Austin, though. I wished he was there. There was a sweet aroma of mint escaping from the oven after we placed the pans inside, and Austin had a real sweet tooth for mint. While waiting for the muffins to be done, we cleaned up our mess. We were silent until Jenny popped a question on me.

“So, how have you been?” She asked.

“Fine.” I said without looking at her. I focused on scrubbing some chocolate out of one of the cracks in my counter…our counter.

“Lucy…” She said. I started scrubbing harder, determined to get every piece of chocolate out of that awful tiny crack. I began scrubbing so hard I felt my knuckles getting white. Jenny put a hand on my shoulder and stopped me. I hadn’t realized I was crying, and I wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands.

“I know you’re still having a hard time without him, but we miss you. All of the girls miss hanging out with you.” She said to me. I just looked down and started scrubbing again.

“I’m doing fine. Only five months left.” I replied. Jenny didn’t ask me much after that. Our mint chocolate chip muffins were ready about ten minutes later anyway, right when Jenny had to leave to go to work. I gave her a few to take with her and gave her a friendly hug goodbye. I went back in the kitchen to put the muffins away in the fridge and finish cleaning the counter, but I couldn’t bear it. I kept feeling the warmness of my tears floating down my cheeks, and constantly wiping them away wasn’t doing any good. I tossed the washcloth into the corner of the counter, carelessly placed the muffins on the table, and swiftly made my way to the front of the house, where I forcefully opened the screen door and collapsed onto the stoop, burying my face in my knees. I cried for a long time. A small dark stain formed on the knees of my jeans eventually. The inside of my hands froze from being wet in the cold. I lifted my face out of its safe nest, and watched the horizon. The sun was setting behind a long string of trees, creating an orange and pink glow above them, a sight I would normally categorize as beautiful. But I barely noticed. It was getting cold. I realized I forgot my jacket, and I could see my breath. I slowly got to my feet and brushed off the rocks from my pants. As I turned to go back inside, I heard something from a short distance away.

“Lucy! Wait!” It was a man’s voice. I sighed and turned around.

“What is it, Andy?” Andy was our mailman. We had always been somewhat of friends, and he was very sympathetic toward me when he found out that Austin’s job had moved him far away from me, for such a long time. He always offered a helping hand, and shared my excitement when he handed me one of Austin’s letters.

“You might not want to go inside yet.” He said, smiling. I lost my breath when he handed me a bright envelope with just a simple drawing of two hearts attached to each other on the back. I smiled the widest smile I could manage. This letter was five months early. I could barely contain myself. Andy smiled at me before returning to his truck, and I tore open the seal with shaking hands. I clumsily opened the folded paper, and felt my smile slowly die. My heart fell to my feet, as I read those words over and over in my head.

It’s over.

It’s over. I dropped the letter, the envelope, and tears started stumbling out of my eyes like waterfalls. Right when I was about to collapse onto the ground in horror, I felt a hand on my shoulder and another on my waist to support me from falling.

“Thank you, Andy.” I muttered through my sorrows. I turned my shuddering legs to face him, but I was caught by surprise when I was met with a pair of bright green eyes, trimmed black hair, and a smile wider than the Earth.

“It’s over, Lucy. I quit the job.” I heard his smooth voice whisper the words.

“Austin…” I mouthed. My voice wouldn’t work, and it didn’t need to. He encased my body with his arms and pulled me in for a kiss I’ve been waiting for since the day he left. I didn’t want to stop, not ever. But I did anyway, because I needed to know…

“Austin, why?” I stared into his eyes. They looked truly amazing against the beautiful sunset landscape, standing on our stoop.

“I was hoping you’d ask that.” His smile grew wider. “I figured this was more important.” He said, kneeling before me with a bright ring in between his fingers.

It seemed like only a few seconds ago, I was repeating the exact actions I was doing in this moment. I pressed my palm over my mouth as my tears flowed over the hills of my fingers. My knees grew weak. He spoke to me in the softest of tones the sweetest words my ears have ever had the pleasure of listening to, but I didn’t hear them then. I only knew what they were because he later repeated them to me. In that moment, I heard nothing but the breathtaking sound of the wind blowing, the happiness of leaves rustling on tree branches. Everything that was so pale and dull to me in my numbness was bright and beautiful in this moment. I could barely say the word.

“Yes.” The moment ended with tight squeezing, fumbling lips, traveling hands, and gasping breaths that choked out words of reassurance. It’s over, it’s over, I can’t believe it’s finally over.

Through my short-lived teenage romances or my years of waiting for my unknown future husband, I would have never guessed the words it’s over would mean a beginning, and not an end.