Fic:When you Tell my Story, Don't Forget Me 6/6
Part Five
[You just don't want to watch me die]
Seeing you like this, After so Many Years
Beloved Father, Poet, Friend
1885 - 1958
Anna stared down at the gravestone, as still as a statue. She had missed his death, avoided his illness, ignored his funeral, abandoned his gravestone… she had let him die in peace. (Though she was haunted by the last words he spoke to her, “You just don’t want to watch me die.” And she knew - how she knew! - that she did not stay from his side for his sake, but for her own.) She had let him rest in peace for almost thirty years before braving the sight of it, before examining the site of it with her own eyes.
Beside his rough stone and incomplete words there was a simple engraving: Devoted Wife and Mother 1892 - 1957. He had lived barely a year after his wife left him alone. (While Anna had stayed as far away as possible, sitting in protest in the South, backpacking through war zones in the East, attending concerts on the West coast… forever moving, moving, moving - avoiding the sight of his face in bookstores, avoiding the memory of him in crowded rooms, forever ignoring the ache in her heart as the one person she had ever loved disappeared from the world with a sigh.) She looked down at the cluttered stone, flowers and chocolates and knick-knacks and copies of his books caked his stone like frosting. (He had only known love and devotion when she had left.) She kicked sullenly at a vase of flowers with her black combat boot, it turned over and a trickle of stale, green water flowed out of it, sinking into the perfectly cut grass. (Always the brooding teen, always the morose child kicking things over, always the infant incapable of growing and learning… in all that time, what had she learned? What could she learn?)
“I’m sorry.”
Her eyes filled with tears and she let them flow down her cheeks. (She was sorry for so many things - for leaving, for keeping him, for not coming to his deathbed, for not apologizing sooner, for not loving him the way he wanted her to…) She brushed off that last thought with a shrug. She had read the reviews on his book - had snuck into his therapist’s office and read through the files - had listened to his children discuss him, her, their story (their fiction) … she knew all the words…
Stunted. Abused. Emotionally scarred. Rape. Abandonment issues. Daddy issues. Oedipal complex. Depression. Neglect.
She had heard it all; she knew everything the world had to say about them - about her. (Nothing is sacred or secret once it is written; nothing is private or pure once you tell the world.) She had muddled over the words a time or two, and then passed them off (“A complex look at a cycle of parental abuse through the narrative trope of vampirism.”) She thought very little of the reviews (“Vampires have rarely been used in this fashion, bringing to the forefront a lovely and heartbreaking story of childhood abandonment and abuse through the use of such a prevalent and popular mythic figure.”) or the reviewers (“This reviewer was really rooting for this couple, hoping until the end that their love story would end in eternity and not with her leaving… it truly shows the amount of emotional duress a young woman can undergo in her first romantic relationship”), ignoring for the most part judgments she had already cast on herself (The metaphor of the “vampire” in order to portray an emotionally dead character was a cop-out, in my opinion. The relationship doesn’t work, not because of her so-called abandonment issues, but because she’s a bitch. He quite frankly deserves better.”) And never so much as considering any of the alternatives (“His obsession with her is quite frightening and an accurate warning to any teen girl before beginning a first relationship”).
She crouched down and reached out with both hands, fingering the words on the two gravestones before her.
“Someday, maybe.”
Someday I won’t be so afraid. Someday I will be capable of living to the fullness that you did. Someday I will not be haunted by the memory of you and your hand over my mouth, of your frail body wrapped in my arms as I sang you to sleep. Someday the nightmares will end. Someday the hazy memories of my own mortality will become as solid as you once were - or will fade away. Someday it will all become clear.
As she walked away into the dusk, preparing for the coming storm, her shoulders pressed into the wind, she avoided the thoughts she couldn’t speak aloud; only secretly hoping that she could finally stop running. (Wouldn’t that be a miracle?)
I don't know why lj made me split it up so much! Hope you all enjoy it, despite the many many pages!