Tonight? she asks, lost in time. A different scene in this same room.
He nods. Don’t ask, it doesn’t make it any easier.
She asks anyway, they always do. How?
I don’t know. I only have to reach you.
IKEA furniture still in boxes in the corner of the room, hovering in the liminal space of moving in and moving out. Her family says, moving on.
He always kissed her in all the wrong places. He was funny and/or she wasn’t. He takes the diploma from the box they have just unpacked to give a shape to this life they’re making.
There is no future in history. Only with you.
Only with you, she agrees. A kiss on the right corner of her lips.
At group counseling the man at the head of the oval, who smells like stale smoke and rotten apples, says it ends or it doesn’t. It could take weeks, or months, or years, all her life.
Her mother brings snacks back from her Christmas trip to Ghana. They open the packages with a deliberate urgency like they did with all things these days, like fire, like lightning, like a heartbeat. Her favorite, a multi-fruit flavored lollipop on a ring. She tells him how she and her best friend growing up would go around their little village, bare feet grass stained and then yellowed in the mud trek after a particularly large haul from the tents at Doctors without Borders, handing them out to the boys they liked, sucking on them first, and then asking them to do it too, like a kiss.
What did you do with the rings, he asks. We asked them to marry us. Did they say yes? Always. He sucks on the lollipop nestled on his index finger, then brings them to the gap between her lips. She sucks on it.
I felt that, he says.
See, it’s just like a kiss.
Those lucky boys, he shakes his head in mock disapproval.
He gets down on one knee, gripping the ring base of the lollipop. What if I asked? Like forever?
Aane, she says. The only Twi word he knows, yes.
Will it be quick?
He hovers around the room, like fear, like death.
On the first anniversary of their marriage, she finds an origami duck at the edge of her pillow. Paper.
Do you remember?
She remembers everything.
Their first not-date, feeding a paddling of ducks by a pond in a small town in the middle of nowhere, Denmark. He starts to dance, an uncoordinated jiggle of hands over feet, ducks pick their mates based on how well they dance. She says, I’m not a duck. In another life perhaps? he asks, hopeful.
Maybe she could leave a note. Dear World – you’ve taken everything from me. She would explain it with words she didn’t have but they would understand an empty note. Dear World – I have nothing left to give.
She finds a note after a night out with friends. A diagnosis. Upstairs, his whole body under the duvet. A faint cry. She lays down behind him, holding his back tightly against her chest as he wails.
A hypothetical. What if I didn’t want to go?
I could hold your hand. His black cloak shimmers in the dim glow of the bedside lamp, scythe disappearing against a product of another dimension where he is hardly perceived, where nothing feels like anything else.
Widow at 25. The internet says she has her whole life ahead of her. She has lived all of it, all the parts she cares about living. You jump, I jump.
Does the pain disappear? Like foam? She wants to know if it will feel any different.
He takes her hand. It will feel like nothing.
