alright, this is from our hearts.
Thank you for spending your lives with me.
She gripped me with lust for just a moment. Her wandering fingers granted me humble permission, and when I kissed her neck hungrily I felt like a monster. It was consensual, yes, but it was nothing short of rape. She tried to smile as I tickled her dainty hips, but her chest convulsed for reasons I couldn’t see. My stamina reduced quickly at the bleary-eyed, numb blanket that engulfed her cool body, but I was already half way there. So I carried on thrusting, thrusting, thrusting. I pulled her arms around me, her limp, clammy hands stroking my back encouragingly. My heart almost broke for her sweetness. I ran my nose along the length of her neck, the muscles in her long thighs contracting as her body reacted with my continued penetrations. She was so closed and unwilling that she squeezed it out of me whether she liked it or not. I opened my eyes as the quivering began and the motions started. It had never been particularly euphoric with Fallon, but the climax came and went quickly as I saw the expression washed over her doll-like features. Her eyes were wide, locked on the ceiling, calculating the time it would take me to finish up and go to sleep. Her lips were pursed so as not to make a sound, brows furrowed with the strain of my bulk inside her.
She smiled as she caught my eyes, but I rolled off her before she said a word, wrapping a towel around myself. Over the course of our twenty year courtship she had seen me properly naked a total of five times. I changed in another room, never slept naked or showered in her presence, and during our rare and brief intercourse, I was covered by sheets or clothes. Usually, I was shrouded by darkness. Precisely because I didn’t want to see that look on her face - not the one I had imagined during lovemaking - the “I want you” look. She was thinking “You’re only my friend”. I let the hot water drum over my freckled, never-quite-adult, always-gangling body. I was exhausted from the effort of trying to get her to fall in love with me tonight. I had been charming at dinner, funny on the drive home. She smiled when I kissed Ellie goodnight. But I suppose trying to seduce her was just too far. I kneeled in the shower, sat in the bath; let the rain come down on my skin. I wouldn’t mind if she beat me with a pole or cut me with a knife, because it was just skin. Just flesh, just my lifeless body anyway. She was inside my head, though; inside my heart. I had considered the possibility of loving someone - anyone else. I tried and failed to feel anything more than fatherly or brotherly affection to women. I tried to see the same sort of beauty in women, fifteen years younger, fifteen years older. My age, my juniors, my seniors.
There was something else in my head, too. Something sinister creeping over my senses and covering my eyes with a thick fog - I hadn’t smelled the mossy sent of Ellie’s ebony curls for half a year now. The jasmine that Fallon usually emitted had been lost on its way to my soul. Brain banging with the migraine that tormented it so readily, I retched into the shower silently, gripping the handrails for support. The fog in my mind blackened. I couldn’t see, I lost my balance. How humiliating, to die in the shower. Not as humiliating as having a fit in it. I fell back into the ceramic and shook, shook, shook. Shuddering with the weight of my sickness, my pupils disappeared into my head. Heel in the plughole where water usually disappeared, in the same sort of way, water crept up at my sides and began to fill the bath as I shook, shook, shook. I stopped, very aware of where I was, head pounding with the fall I had taken. I looked at the water, shimmering with my still, ordinary reflection. The body I had worked so hard to tone so as not to repulse my unwilling wife was not beautiful, not matter how I tried to make it so, no matter that she rarely saw it anyway. And from now, it would only get worse.
I knew exactly what to do, and how to do it. It was a cliché I was conforming to - it was how every Jacobs man before myself at left the world. I didn’t care about the afterlife, I tuned out when Ellie and Fallon discussed angels. They sat around the living room as though they were naughty children with meaningful secrets, while I, clueless, balanced a script on my knees and tried dually to survive. All I wanted was out, now. I locked the door behind me, numb, quiet, knowing she had not waited, but was showering in the plush bathroom down the hall. She would labor over her body. She’d never guess why she scrubbed herself so hard after we ‘made love’. She was too good for resentment. I took her blunt, clean black stick of eyeliner, hands shaking as I wiped the mirror clean with my moist hands, straining, straining as always, not to make a mess of this. Don’t make a mess of it, Scott. Don’t fuck it up. I had heard nothing but this mantra for the last forty three years, endlessly resounding in my cluttered mind. I tried to make the note small and discreet as possible, but large enough to grab someone’s attention, before letting the eyeliner back into its place in her little bag of toiletries.
I cleaned the bathroom as the water level began to rise, made sure every detail was in place. Made sure I had no excuse to turn back. After that first meeting with Dr. Rourke, I had re-written and filed my will. Sixty percent to Fallon, forty percent to Ellie: the extra ten percent that Fallon had was hers to give to Ellie when she wished - the third car, my old scripts. I figured as I scrubbed the floor spotless that even if one of these ends were left loose, it wouldn’t matter to me. I didn’t want to look back. I didn’t even want to survive in event of a recovery; my existence was the most meaningless matter that bothered to clutter this earth. I was impeccably groomed, my hair brushed even though the water would muss it. My fingernails clipped, my stomach full. It was a good way to die, I guessed. I stepped into the water and lay peacefully underneath the surface, not struggling as the water filled my throat and airways, body convulsing naturally as it fought for life. It needn’t, I thought. If Fallon brought herself to sort through my things, she would see the hundreds of letters I had penned to her and Ellie containing my thoughts and feelings, the dated letters I had kept hidden for years and continued to hide. A convenient goodbye. Try as I might, there was no smile on my face as death’s warm fingers laced my own.