Page 40 of Make Me Forget
See You on the Other Side
Murphy
Icrawled out of a bed in a haze. All night, I tossed and turned, thinking about Mara and why I couldn’t break through to her. Every time I felt something in her fortress give, she ran away long enough to shore back up theholes.
A less stubborn man might take it personally. Regardless, I got maybe two hours of sleep before my alarm blared. My phone sat silent next to the clock, and I glared at it, too, for not alerting me to a text fromher.
How can a person not send a dang text? Not even an,I’m alive after you fucked my brains out and I had a meltdown in yourshower.
I cleaned up and dressed quickly, loathe to wash the scent of her from my skin and hair. At least my sheets might smell like her for a few days, unless I could convince her to come back. And stay. Definitely to stay. I had more room in my apartment than a single man could ever need, and she didn’t have many possessions from what I saw at thehotel.
Her return seemed unlikely considering I heard her sobbing on the bathroom floor. I wanted to break down my own door and comfort her, but I could only push so far, and the little voice in the back of my head gnawed at me. Blaming me for why she fled. I asked her several times while we were together. I don’t think I pushed her, but a tiny fleck of my brain always worried I could take something too far one day. Not that I spent enough time with women for it to become a realanxiety.
I locked up, climbed in my truck, and headed toward the bar. It sat on the side of the main route through town the way it had for fifty years. A place I’d never leave, more home than home for me. I pulled into the lot, sat there, and stared at the worn brick and the refuse I needed to clean up in the parking lot, and I never felt more like I belonged there. Just right there, at the bar, working, making love to Mara at night, and seeing her open up to me one day. It might be slow progress, but I assumed she tried. The therapy was helping. At least, I thought so. She’d never hear it from methough.
Now, I stared at the door of her hotel room. Everything in me screamed to go see if she was okay. And yet, I remember her distinctly informing me she was a big girl and had to do things her way. In fact, she was adamant on the phone. I remember it, because she ripped me a new one, and she made it clear she didn’t need anything from me unless she asked forit.
Murphy, she did not ask you to check on her. She did not ask you to call her. She fucking did not give you any sign, hint, or warning she needed to see you thismorning.
Where was the line between too much and not enough? I’d never been able to drawit.
Saint Murphy,indeed.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to work if I didn’t check on her. At the very least stand on her threshold and see for my own eyes I hadn’t been the one to hurt her. So I walked across the parking lot, hoping she wouldn’t snap at me for asking. I knocked softly andwaited.
Noanswer.
I knocked harder this time and listened at the door. The silence greeting me sent a chill down myspine.
A spike of fear punted me up the ass, and I scrambled in my jean’s pocket for the key she gave me shortly after coming back home. I slid it in the lock and shoved the door open, preparing myself for theworst.
The worst bed making job I’d ever seen in mylife.
She wasn’t there, and I checked the bathroom just in case she might have slipped orsomething…
I didn’t let myself fill in the end of such athought.
I glanced around her room to make sure nothing was broken like she’d been kidnapped by coal miners orsomething.
My mind jetted off to weird places if I left ituntethered.
I spotted a notebook on the desk, soft brown with my name scrawled across the cover. Opening a notebook with my name on it wasn’t invading her privacy,right?
I told myself the lie and tried to believe it as I flipped open the cover and stared at the top. Mara’s mental health history and her race from my apartment last night nailed shut the coffin of my resolve as I glanced over the page. Dated the night before. She must have written it when she left myplace.
The chair sat pulled out, and I set myself on the edge while I squinted at her tiny cursivehandwriting.
Date: 2February
DearMurphy,
There are so many things I wanted to tell you. So many thoughts and ideas skittering through my mind, but I don’t know how to get them out. When I’m around you, everything in my brain sort of implodes, and I lose all the words except the badones.
I think it did that before too. I wrote in my journal all we ever seemed to do was fight and fuck. That’s what the page said: ‘Murphy and I did two things well…fighting andfucking.’
Maybe we haven’t gotten over it yet, and maybe it would take some time. It’s time I don’t have. You know who you are. I have no idea who I am, and it’s worse when I’m with you. I fold myself into your identity and cling to its solid jagged edges which give all the room I could need to balance. At some point, I need to find myself, but I fear I neverwill.
There’s a darkness in me, a hole I can never quite fill up except with more darkness. The void slowly grows, eating away every safe space and semblance of a home I build in my mind. Until one day, I fear it will consume metoo.
