The Absent Emptiness

Gwen joined me on the balcony overlooking the city. I hadn't shaved in a couple days, but she told it looked good. The breeze was pleasant, like the one that carried my mother's ashes away. She had always wanted to travel, to get out and see the world. She couldn't, not with a son and a dead beat husband. I scattered her ashes to the wind, so she could touch down on China, England, Russia, France, all over the world.

Gwen laid her head on my shoulder, wrapping her arms around me in a sweet embrace. I smiled, it was going to be okay. Our friends and colleagues awaited us inside of our house that we had bought together. My piles of papers and revisions, now made into collectible volumes of literature that magazines and critics raved about. I wasn't like anything they'd ever seen in their lives. They asked me what my inspiration was...

We were celebrating the latest publication of one of my collections. Rather, it was her collection. I didn't want any credit for it, so the party was really for her. I wasn't the best writer out there, far from it, but I wasn't the worst either. I shattered the aged tabernacle of being a crazed alcoholic booze hound, who wrote out of drunken experience and slurred sonnet. Sorry Charles Bukowski, but I'm not nearly as gifted as you.

I take my place amongst them, co-workers, friends of friends, all of them decent people. They see my talent, and love me for it, raising long fluted glasses to my triumph. My tragedies are my triumphs, my medicine for the sickness, the shushing of a colicky baby in the still cold night.
I am not Lola Chloe, I am but her legacy carrier.

She was a woman who loved me for ten seconds of her life, and left me. She was the wake up call for me to face things that I had long ago painted over with brilliant bullshit paints of lies and self doubt. She..saved me.

"What are you thinking about?" Gwen asked, noticing my quiet composure.

"Mm..not much hon, just...thinking really.."

She smiled knowingly at me, her diamond ring glinting in the dim light cast by lamps and fire place. She leaned in and kissed me, keeping that knowing smile.

"If you need any help thinking, let me know," she said, turning back to entertain the guests.

That is why I love her so much, she's understanding, even more so that Lola ever was in those few moments of our meeting. After the funeral, Gwen took me to a bar, to get drunk. She helped me fix things that I had given up on. She gave me a choice, to live or to live with death.

What all these people in our house don't know, is that locked in a safe box under our bed, are the original works of Lola Chloe, now being priced at quarter of a million dollars worth of essays and such. I will never sell those, Gwen knows this too. I will keep them for my children, and my children's children. A written wake up call to those who forget what is really out there, aside from their own thoughts and feelings.

I think back to that day with the police officer, how he let me go. He gave me a second chance, even if he did have suspicions of me, he let me go. I remember getting back home, a wreck. It took upwards to half a year for me to readjust to being without my parents, my mother being missed the most. I forgave my father by forgetting about him, the scars he left me are badges of life evermore, of moving past the pain and focusing in on that which is apparent and evident...life.

The Lola Chloe case was closed with suicide being ruled, she was given a quiet burial in an unmarked grave somewhere in Brooklyn Park. It was what she had wanted, and it fit.

"Tyler! I got a question man, one that has been bugging me for some time now!" a friend said, coming up to where I sat.

"Where do you get your inspiration man? I mean, we all write here, but you, you're a whole new story!"

What would he want me to say? What would you want me to say? I smiled and didn't play modest, I was done with that role.

"Life, love..and her."

He looked at me puzzled, but soon caught on. I nodded, not caring if he really did understand me, as long as it was true to me and how I felt about it, it was all that mattered.

I had a grouping of interviews with various magazines and literary societies within the next couple of months, to converse over my latest work and what to expect in the future. It was now my turn, my chance, to tell the world the things that one woman could not do with just one voice.

"Life's best moments, are the ones longest delayed and hidden," I said under my breath.

The friend looked at me, "What, did you say something?"

I shook my head, ignoring the question. Gwen saw me from across the room, and nodded.
She knew what I meant whenever I shook my head to a question asked. The world wasn't ready to hear it, not yet.