I'll Keep Waiting

“Don’t go without me tonight, Gee,” the moon shone across the empty bed, as I sat awake sweating and wringing my hands together. Rusted blood still sat on the clothes lying on the floor. He still hadn’t come back from his walk around the neighborhood that he had said he needed.

It’s been five years to this day as the clock switches over to midnight. It’s been five years since he got into that hearse of a Honda, driving to that graveyard of a bar.
He drove himself to his own funeral.

“You can’t leave without me now, Gee. You can’t leave now.” I remember the blood pooling on the bathtub floor beneath his wrists as he hung over the edge, I remember how bloodshot and swollen his now colorless eyes were.
I remember everything but the things I knew oh so well.

It’s been too long; I’ve been sitting here alone in this bed for too long. Five years it’s been walking these streets alone, tracing the invisible blood path from the bar to the hospital. I remember everything from the sand and skies we shared together to the blood and tears that stained our skin.
I remember everything except those scars and the colors of his eyes. I’ve blocked them out since he’s been gone on that walk he needs.

“I won’t hate you, Gee, just don’t leave me.” I keep waiting here, for him to walk through that door with his vacant eyes and slashed wrists.

I need to keep him here, as we walk together now along the beach on the night of my grandmother’s funeral, while the moon reflects across the crashing waves. I want the world to stop here as he kneels down and takes a handful of sand and presses it into my hand and his decorated wrists. Pain brings the both of us to the ground, where the waves lap our waists. I cry as he stares into the flesh of our hands and wrists.
“Do you understand now, Gee, why you must move on when people leave?”
I nodded and understood.

My eyes are squeezed shut, as the tears find their way onto the duvet beneath my curled up body. I still see his outstretched form behind my eyelids, as his eyes bore into mine and his lips meet my own again. My hands bring the blood from the fresh cuts on his mangled body and he bleeds on the clean sheets as we bring each other closer and closer, never leaving each other again. He whispers to me as I bring him down and kiss his wounds closed.
“If this isn’t love, then how are we getting out of it?”

I stare at the ceiling, watching the molding change to shredded paper clouds. He’s walking away as I’m falling to my knees and screaming “I love you” into the cement scratching like claws into my face, and I failed him again and the words don’t ring true to his black clad back as he leaves me for the first time.
All I want to do now is break through these bedroom walls holding me inside and away from him. I’m never letting go, and I’m never giving him the answers for the questions he still has as he tosses and turns in his grave.

The moon keeps me here as he lays one thousand miles away. I can’t get to him.
He’s still on his walk he claims he needs.

“I need you, Gee.” His eyes stare at the floor as he takes my hand from my pocket and wraps my fingers around his wrist. Blood seeps from his skin and onto my own as he brings me closer to his desperate form, having no consideration for the state that he’s in, having no consideration for the tears streaming down the both of our faces as we continue with the routine of these past three months before he leaves me forever. His mouth on my own muffles the choked out words that the both of us need to hear. “Stop, Frankie, I love you, just stop this before we can’t live anymore.”

The words carved into the nightstand before he left stare me in the face as I still wait for him to return and tell me its okay before climbing back beneath the covers and wrapping my arm around his waist.
“I don’t hate you.”