Saviour

It wasn’t always this way with Lydia and Robert. Once upon a time, in this same queer blue two-story house, Lydia and Robert were perfectly in love. Robert used to watch Lydia water the flowers out front with a stupid smile on his face and Lydia used to laugh as Robert stumbled out in his robe with one hand holding his coffee and the other massaging his five o’clock shadow, trying to figure out the easiest way to bend down and snatch the newspaper.

Lydia had trouble remembering the feeling of those days now, it was much like trying to recall the way a lover’s trembling hands felt in a dream. Sometimes she wasn’t sure if it was ever real.

Now those flowers were dead and covered in January’s snow and Robert never read the newspaper and they were definitely not perfectly in love.

Robert was out, as he had been for the last seventeen hours, and Lydia was alone.

Lydia savored these moments, but at the same time, they were some of her worst. They cleared her head and clouded it again and made her do stupid things. Robert made Lydia do stupid things. Lydia made Lydia do stupid things.

She stood in her thick, faded blue towel and studied her reflection. The tile was cold underneath her feet, and she had the urge to lay down on it, to feel the rest of her hot, fresh skin pressed against it and let the chill settle over her, like opening the freezer door.

So she did. And as she did, she felt terribly small and inadequate, like when her professor called her work juvenile. The worst part was, when she thought about it, she wasn’t sure if she could even spell juvenile.

She remembered going back to her all-white room that night and studying the word juvenile and its synonyms.

Lydia placed her hands, still slick from her shower, palm down on the tile and pushed herself up. She looked out of the window, watching bits of fluff fall to join the heaps of snow that had already gathered on her grass and flower beds.

She tore her eyes away from the snow and, in a trance, hurried downstairs and through the front room and into the kitchen and out of the back door and onto the peach wooden patio. A smile found its way to her pale lips and she took one, two, three, four steps until just one bare foot was slowly lowering itself to rest in the icy, more gray than white snow. Again, she wanted to lie down and press her head in it and make an angel and sleep her life away, numb and cold but ever so lovely. She’d look like a freckled flower gracefully placed atop the ice. And here, she would wait for Robert until he came back.

If she was dead or blue by then, it would be his fault, not hers. She wondered, for a moment, if he would be upset.

She started to take another step into the snow, but before her foot touched it, she spun around quickly and walked back inside and rested her head on the couch instead, hiding away from the cold.

She thought her heart should be beating fast with there being such a beautiful, deadly want in her head, but it was steady as ever. Thump, thump, thump.