Vacancy Signs

Oh, darling. You're holding on so tightly. I can almost feel your hands around my wrist, your arms around my neck. If my heart still beat, if there was still blood in me, I'd have bruises. But I don't, and barely anything hurts anymore, so hold on as tight as you need to. I don't mind.

Am I selfish? Perhaps I am. This isn't good for you, to be holding onto me so strongly. And yet here I am, day after day, night after night, letting you. Staying near you. Holding onto you as tightly as you're holding onto me, but I suppose that's both of our faults. Neither of us were very good at letting go of things – good or bad, petty or monumental. This…this was as beyond monumental as you could get.

So I don't blame you, darling, for any of it. For keeping me here, for keeping me as alive as I can be. Sometimes, I feel like I'm still right there with you. You talk to me, and I hear you, and I say something back but then I remember you cannot hear me, and I have been reduced to nothing but a ghost. A memory. A by-product of almost certain psychosis. That's when it hurts. That's when the wounds are torn open, and I bleed again. That's when it feels like I'm back to that night, and I'm lying there, dying, only wishing I could touch you one last time.

Every day, I die again. Just from watching you suffer. You shouldn't suffer over me, I'll be okay. Nothing can hurt me here. Nothing but you, which is the most ironic thing, I guess. Before, it used to be that you were one of the only people I could trust not to hurt me, But now you're the source of every pain I feel. Never once do I wish that you'd let me go, though. Never. Not if it helps you. I'm not sure I'm ready to leave yet anyway.

It was so sudden. If I weren't standing behind you and seeing my name scrawled across the tombstone, I wouldn't believe it. It's like an out of body experience, or watching a movie. To be standing at my own grave and knowing that my life has ended, but yet not being able to believe it…it's maddening. To watch those I loved, and who loved me, stagger around, shoving their agony down while I try desperately to make them see that I'm still here…that part of me is still here…that is the only time I even come close to wishing I could just let go.

I reach forward, but I can't touch you. I can't feel you. If I could, I know what I'd do. I'd push my hand into your hair, pull it back away from your face, and kiss you. And when you stopped crying, I'd lean in, speaking softly. "Eternity was in our lips and eyes," I'd whisper, tracing along the back of your neck with my fingertips. "Bliss in our brows' bent; none our parts so poor, but was a race of heaven." You wouldn't get it, but it would make you feel better anyway, and you'd loosen your grip on me a little and we would both feel better…if only for a moment.

God, you always looked so pretty when you cried, but it always hurt to see you like that. Every time you cried, I cried too, I just couldn't help it…even if I was angry at you, and especially if you were angry at me, if I'd done something to hurt you. I couldn't bear it. That's why I was driving home that night. It was one of our famous four hour phone calls, and exactly three hours and fifty three minutes into it, we started fighting. I can't remember over what – there are a lot of details that I can't recall –but I now that it was my fault, and I had said something hurtful, and you were crying over the phone, and I couldn't stay away from you. I couldn't be two hours away from you at that awful grad school my parents were paying for, so I got in my car, and I started driving.

I could only think of you. I saw you in every flash of light driving down the dark highway, in the mournful songs that played on the radio, feeing more like torture to me. I had hurt you. The most important person in my life, and I had hurt you, and I wasn't there in person to make it better. That's what I had thought I was fixing…guess I should have known better.

It was raining, but from what I understand, the water wasn't the initial cause of the crash at all, although it made things worse in the end much. This is another thing I don't remember well at all, but I do recall that I didn't even see it coming. A deer darted out from the woods on the opposite side of the road, and the driver slammed his breaks, and spun right in the center of the road, smashing in the side of my cherry red Mazda that I had picked out because it reminded me of the color of your lipstick.

I must have blacked out on impact, because I don't remember the seven times the car rolled over, ending with it top down in a ditch with the rain pouring in, and I don't remember how it felt the instant the glass and twisted metal pierced my side. I do remember waking up, damp from the rain and soaked in sticky blood all down my right side. I could barely breathe, but I was alive…for a little moment there. My head was resting against the roof of the car, the rest of my body supported by the seat belt, tattered, twisted and ripped, but still mostly intact. The water was pooling around my head, and the blood was pouring down my body, and I could only think that it was a race to see which killed me first – the blood loss, or the water that was slowly getting deeper and deeper around my immobilized head.

It was cold. I could only hear my teeth chattering, and the rain hitting the warped metal scraps of the car, and my own waning heartbeat swishing weakly in my ears. I strained to listen for sirens, or see red and blue flashing lights, but there was nothing. The other driver must have been trapped too, or had already died…I never found out which one it was.

I closed my eyes. God, Hanna, it was so cold, each second got worse than the one that came before it. But I hope they told you I didn't suffer, because in the end, I guess I really didn't. Because just when I thought the cold was too much, and my head was going to explode from how much it hurt, I managed to think of you, with the inch of mental acuity I had left.

And, suddenly, I could remember every minute we'd ever spent together. How, when I met you in the park after my soccer practice, my parents had to come looking for me because I stayed talking to you for so long. Our freshman year of high school, where I did your term paper, and you paid me in trashy gossip magazines because my parents had forbidden them. The A thing, how we all endured it together, but also how strong you were, how resilient you were…never letting on what A had on you, always letting the rest of us be the first ones to fall apart. You were the only one of us who could always laugh like she used to…you were stronger than all of us. People always thought it was me, or back before A, Ali. But I really think it was you all along.

I remembered when we picked our colleges, and our choices ended up around seven miles apart from one another, whereas Aria and Emily were split up on opposite ends of the country. I remembered when, on the very first weekend, without fail, you showed up at my dorm with a Bio assignment and a pile of the latest gossip rags. I remembered that that was the first night I ever kissed you. It was while you were sleeping, and the urge was brief and fleeting, but in the dark my lips met your forehead, and your eyelashes fluttered, and I had never been so enthralled by someone before.

I remembered when you first kissed me. It was dark, and cold, and raining, a night much like the one where I laid dying. I was dropping you off to wait for the bus – you were making a sojourn back to Rosewood, and I was not. I hugged you, and held you for a moment too long, because I didn't' want to let you go, and you must have noticed, because when I finally did, you pulled me back around and kissed me. It was sudden, and it scared me, it scared me half to death, but you tasted like cherry lipgloss and cotton candy, and the rain was pouring down all around us, and by the time we needed to breathe, I was feeling brave, braver than I'd ever felt before.

I remembered our first apartment – how our parents were thrilled at the idea that we were living with people they knew and could trust, when they really couldn't trust us at all. You wrote me notes in lipstick on the mirror every morning, and even though the shower was the size of a small closet, we could still make room in there for the two of us most of the time. I let you use part of my trust fund to decorate, so it wouldn't feel so bare, but I could have been in a white room with no windows and still have felt at home with you.

I remembered the day I got into grad school, four hours away from the home – I will always consider it my home – that we had made, how I didn't want to go, and you begged me to, and you'd stay there and wait for me, and that I'd better visit every weekend, or you'd drive up there and murder me yourself. I relented after three days of this, but I only did it so we had a chance at a better future together. I hated it, but it was always worth it…for the life we planned out at two am when neither of us could sleep and we were hopeful.

I remembered the last time I saw you. You were waving goodbye from the balcony of our tiny place, like from the widow's walk of an old sailing house – how apt that description would become. How I stopped my car, because I couldn't leave just yet, and ran all the way up the fire escape, and with a whisper in your ear and my arms around your waist, I asked you to be my wife someday, when the distance was no longer an issue, and we could craft the future we'd wanted.

And it was thoughts of that future that would never be carried me away as my heartbeat finally ceased.

I didn't suffer, Hanna. But you are. And I wish more than anything I was more than this nothingness so I could stop it. I would die to stop you from hurting – I did die in the attempt. I can only hope that it will pass, that this won't be for nothing. I can't stand here forever and watch you cry when I've already done everything I can to stop it.

You're holding onto me so tightly. But I think I might be holding on tighter.