The wind is howling around us now. Clouds are obscuring the moonlight. There’s no way Esme’s going to see me.
When the car engine starts up again, I know it’s over for me.
Tires crunch over gravel. It gets quieter and quieter.
And then they’re gone. Taking my last hopes with them.
Once I can no longer hear the vehicle, I let my eyes close again. This time, I don’t fight it. I don’t try to stay awake.
This is it. My fucking swan song.
I let her face fill the back of my eyelids.
I let myself remember all of it, all of her. Our whispered words and our fierce promises.
I’ve tucked them all away in the darkest recesses of my mind, waiting for the day I can bring them out again. Waiting for the day I can scour through them. And that day has come. I’m like an addict who’s finally allowed himself to break after twelve years of abstaining.
Saoirse.
She floods my mind. Her aqua-blue eyes. Her wild red hair.
I’ve spent the last twelve years feeling all kinds of emotions when I thought of her.
Bitterness.
Anger.
Hurt
Love.
Forgiveness.
Confusion.
Devastation.
Some years, I made progress. I evolved in my recounting of our past. Came to peace with parts of it. Found ways to forgive.
Other years weren’t so go. I regressed. Blamed her for everything and felt a knot of rage roiling in my chest.
Through it all, though, I never stopped thinking about her.
Every time I was between a woman’s thighs, I saw Saoirse’s face first. Like a fucking scarlet comet, her image would streak across my mind’s eye, leaving me blinded for a moment.
I learned to ignore it. To push through it.
But I never learned to stop seeing her.
Sometimes, I’d shut my eyes and pretend she was the one beneath me. That was never enough, though. Not when my body still remembered what it felt like to kiss her. To touch her. To be inside her.
So as I hurtle towards death, I let myself do what I’ve resisted for twelve long years—fall into the memories I tried to kill.
I’m finally at peace with dying—as long as I have her name on my lips.