As Grief Slumbers

I saw her again last night. I tried to apologise but she wasn’t having it, she said I had to wait because she was busy, and it had been so long already, so I thought well, what’s another day?

We sat together for a long time, doing not much at all really. We tried to turn on the TV but I couldn’t get the remote to work, and when I opened the back it didn’t have any batteries. We spent all night looking for new ones, scouring the house and hunting all over town, through deserted streets and shopping centres. I kept trying to talk to her about what happened, to tell her I was sorry, that I let her down, but she was always changing the subject. The batteries were just as elusive, we lost them as fast as we found them, but I didn’t care, it was time with her and it flew by like a vulture. We got back home and the batteries were all wrong, they wouldn’t fit, and somehow she had a hundred of them stashed in her pockets and so did I. We started giggling about it just as I woke up.

The warmth of her laughter was drowned out by my alarm and shame washed over me again. The empty space in my bed stretched for miles beside me like a tundra of white sheets. I still hadn’t apologised to her, but what good would it do? There was nothing I could say in my sleep that would bring her back to me.

I’ve dreamed of her every night for a year. Never the same dream, never letting me tell her what I want to tell her. Never, ever long enough.

The shadow of guilt chased me all the way to work, where I stared at my email inbox with the enthusiasm of a hearse driver. The damp April was falling away to a sweltering May and hay fever had me by the nose with its itching grip. On my lunch break I snuck out to the pharmacy down the street, desperate to be free of my nasal hell. I picked up the first box of allergy tablets I could find and, after paying, took one standing on the street outside. The midday sun was blistering and I loosened my tie, choked by sweat and remorse and pollen. I took another one for good measure.

With a sweaty hand I fiddled with the ring in my pocket, empty of the elegant finger it had once belonged to. Mila, her name was. Mila Rodić. We had met in the autumn, and drank pumpkin spice lattes all through October. I remember asking her out for a drink, and she had recoiled. She didn’t drink, not when we met. I proposed at that cafe, 4 years later.

I dragged myself back to my computer desk and waited for the day to be over. I wanted nothing more than to be within the warm embrace of my dreams, sitting, doing nothing with her. If I couldn’t see her when I was awake, then all I ever wanted was to sleep.

But I still hadn’t apologised to her. For what? I could hear her saying. She knew what, it was I that had been struggling for more than a year to find the words. For not doing enough? For trying to stay out of things and ending up letting her go? For not saying goodbye? Really, she was the one that had left without a goodbye, but still the guilt crushed my chest as if I were deep underwater.

I changed the tab on my computer back and forth. I opened an email draft and pressed keys at random, yawning. I scanned the room, wall to wall with desks and computers and people in suits and pencil skirts. Then there she was, stark against the dull greys of the office in her long, carmine coat. Her dark hair was pulled into a soft bun and I almost wept at the sight of her pointed face, brows pulled together in concentration.

“Mila!” I called, and she looked over. She smiled radiantly, and the sun seemed to pour golden light upon her from some obscure window in the office.

She came over and I took her by the hands and sat her in my chair and I couldn’t believe she was here, really here, sitting so elegantly in my work chair as if it were a throne. I hadn’t worshipped her when I had the chance, and now it was only right to grovel for mercy like a subject to his queen. She said nothing, waiting expectantly.

“Mila.” Her name was like honey on my palate, sweet and forgiving. “Mila, listen. I’m so sorry.”

“For what?” There, she had said it, as I always knew she would. I felt a sort of vindication fight its way through the grief and guilt and aching.

I fumbled for the words. “I’m sorry that I let you go without saying goodbye. I’m sorry that I let you go at all, that I wasn’t there for you when you needed me the most. I’m sorry that I judged you when I should have been supporting you. I’m sorry I let you get away, that I even made you feel like you had to get away.”

But it was too little, too late. She knew it, and she knew I knew it, as she held my gaze and smiled, even as tears slipped from her eyes. The pressure on my chest grew only heavier, and my anchor pulled me deeper into the crushing ocean.

“You want to know the truth, Mila?” I was shaking, shuddering like a kettle boiling over, “It broke me, too. Above all, I’m sorry that I made you feel like you were suffering alone.”

Suddenly, Paul, my boss, appeared beside me. Mila turned to look and at once I saw something that yanked the air from my throat. The left side of her face was a deathly purple, deep and unmistakably bruised, almost black. A rivulet of blood slithered from her left eye and her jaw was harrowingly askew. My knees met the floor with a dull thud.

“Sleeping on the job, eh?” said Paul.

My mind was still reeling from shock and trying to process this was like trying to swim through syrup.

“What?” I got out.

“Christ, he’s completely out of it.”

The voice pulled me away from Mila and I opened my eyes to find that I had collapsed onto my computer keyboard. I peeled my face away from the keys and rubbed my cheek, hot with embarrassment and engraved with key-shape lines.

Paul’s round, cheerful face peered into my sunken eyes, close enough that I could see grey hairs amongst his dark beard.

“Everything ok, son?”

I still had one foot in my dreamscape, “Yeah, yes. Sorry. Won’t happen again.”

Paul nodded and picked up the box of allergy tablets on my desk.

“Make sure you get the non-drowsy ones next time, eh?”

“Right.”

He tossed me the box and shuffled off to his office as I stared, open-mouthed at my computer screen. An email draft with no recipient read “Dear Mila,” followed by a series of ‘g’s that was long enough to make the computer lag as I tried to delete them.