God I really wish he was. I miss him so badly. Miss the easy conversation we had and the easy silences we could sit in. I miss just seeing his face every morning when I wake up or the press of his lips on the back of my neck every night when I go to sleep.
In the end though, I never could convince him to leave and I couldn’t find the courage to walk away from him either. It was selfish of me I know that now, but like I said, I was in love with him and I needed him.
But now he’s gone and I have no one. I’m lonely and I’m miserable. I wake up every morning hating my life and the way I have to live it. I want to have friends, I wish I still had my family and I really want someone to love, someone who loves me in return. I really just want Sam back.
Mostly, I think it should be me who’s the one dying.
∞
Since being born, I’ve been responsible for twelve deaths. I know most people experience some form of death throughout their life, but with me it’s very different. I just don’t think it’s normal for a twenty-five year old to lose that many people, and certainly not in the way I’ve lost them. I’m not saying I’ve directly killed anyone, but every death can be traced back to me, to something I did which ultimately resulted in their death.
Every single one of them.
The first person who died was my mother. I hadn’t been in this world for long, only one minute, before I lost her. Of course my birth was the reason for her death. Unforseen complications they called it. I never expected to be an unforseen complication. Then again, I never really expected any of this. I grew up with that hanging over me, an unforseen complication who killed her mother. My Dad always said that was crap, that it wasn’t my fault. But if I hadn’t been born, she never would’ve died, would she?
There never seemed to be any rhyme or reason to the deaths, why some lived longer than others, or even how frequently it happened. After the first one, I got a break for ten years. But then it came back. My Dad survived the first twenty-one years of my life, yet with Adam, it was only six months. With Sam I got five years, but it could’ve been forever and it still wouldn’t have been long enough.
To look at me you’d probably never see this problem I have, and I certainly don’t go around advertising it. On the outside I try to lead what I think looks like a regular life, doing all the normal things people do – work, pay my bills and occasionally go to the movies or something. In reality though it’s nothing like that because I can’t form any attachments, can’t have any real friends, don’t have a family and I definitely can’t fall in love again.
So in fact, my life is far from normal, it’s actually complete shit.
These last few weeks since Sam died have been tough. I stopped working for the first couple because I just couldn’t drag myself out of bed in the morning. I lost loads of weight and probably became a borderline alcoholic. I would spend days looking at old photos of us, willing him to come back to me. Nights I would spend drinking and crying, trying not to fall asleep so I wouldn’t have to face the horrifying nightmare all over again. The same nightmare repeated every single night of that one fateful day. It’s hard to know what’s worse, having to go through it in the first place or reliving it every night since.
Back then, after it first happened, I felt like I was drowning. Sinking into a pool of blackness that I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to crawl out of, or if I even wanted to. I didn’t think it would matter anyway, because who would miss me. All of the people I loved and cared about were already gone.
When I found his letter, it was a very bad day. I wasn’t in a good place and I was really, really drunk, systematically working my way through our entire alcohol collection. I discovered the letter sitting under the last bottle we had. I guess he knew me well.
Even in my drunken stupor, I stopped short to look at the plain white envelope that had For Ash written across the front in his writing. I must have eventually passed out because when the nightmare woke me the next morning, I was lying on the floor with a pounding headache, a puddle of scotch beside me and a crumpled envelope in my hands. I didn’t want to read it like that, just a pool of drunken depression on the floor of our apartment, so I dragged myself into a scolding hot shower and tried to wash away the disgust I had for myself. When I was clean, I pulled on one of Sam’s t-shirts, made a strong cup of coffee, curled up in the bed we shared, took a deep breath and read his words.