By: Riley Eleanor

It’s six twenty-two in the morning and the last time I was up this early was four years and ten months ago. You see, this sunrise will be the last I will view in San Francisco, perhaps the last ever. In this still coolness, it’s hard to make out much of anything, save for the boxes littered around this almost-empty loft. All I can feel is the unusual weight of the air around me, heavy and chilled, causing goosebumps to dot my skin and make me yearn for more clothing than the bra and underwear I currently reside in. Looking around the room to ensure that everything is perfectly still, including Nathan, my fiancée, who is dormant, peaceful, lovely, I grab the butcher knife from the counter and set it down on the kitchen table. Quietly, I drag a full cardboard box across the floor and to the slab of chipped wood in front of me. I take my humble engagement ring off, and place it next to the knife. Nathan will probably be awake in an hour or so, so it’s important that I hurry and decide. I either take the engagement ring and submit to this life, or I end it completely.

Jesus, how do I get out of this? I suppose that if I’m not entirely sure that I want to die than I shouldn’t make it happen. But do I want to live? Do I really want to live? God, this indifference is about as bad as craving death. What’s the point? What’s the point of living at all? I don’t know what I want anymore, but I do. I want her. I want her so bad and I can’t have her. It’s too late. I want happiness but I’m not happy. I want death. I want to press the blade in front of me into my wrists, my thighs, my neck. I want out, because at least mindless silence will give me some fucking peace of mind.

Maybe it’s not that I want out of life, but out of my mind then, because all of my inner demons look just like her. I don’t want the life that I have, that I’m stuck in, that I can’t get out of, because the world isn’t that kind. God damn it, I want to want the life I have, because by society’s standards it isn’t that bad. Technically I’m privileged. But I feel like I’m settling and I don’t want to. But I am, I am, I am. And I swore I never would, so maybe I deserve to be six feet under. Besides, if I don’t have the real, honest-to-God desire to live, then maybe I shouldn’t.

I’m so sick of everybody, all of them. There isn’t a single person I know other than Nathan who doesn’t just sit by, frowning behind a veil of feigned contentedness, feeling sorry for themselves but unwilling to show it. I’m so sick of telling people I’m sad only to have them say that I shouldn’t be or that life is too short to cry. But Jesus Christ, it’s not my fault that my world is so heavily tinged with melancholy that some days I would rather sit on the kitchen floor all day than frolic in the sun or whatever shit I’m supposed to do to be happy. God, why should I want to be happy anyway if it means idle complacency? You never hear people in “happy” marriages talk about how great their sex lives are. They’re all so goddamn cookie-cutter. Forget happy, I’d choose freedom any day, even if that liberty comes with a few nights chock full of utter and complete panic. But then again I am choosing that complacency, because I’d rather settle than live one more night so terribly alone. People are fools, and everyone treats love like it’s filled with some kind of gorgeous poignancy, but it isn’t. I don’t know what it is anymore but it isn’t that cinematic. It isn’t that real. Hell, at this point we’re even romanticizing death.

And I’m really mad, because I expected true love to be like looking at a person and hearing their name and just… knowing. I expected it to be similar to when a couple goes to adopt a child and they finally meet them and embrace them and say “oh baby, we’ve been waiting for you.” Because really, I had to wait a long time to know love, so I thought it’d be more instantaneous. But it turns out that all of those awfully clichéd people were right. I didn’t know what I had until she was gone, until I was, once again, that abandoned child sobbing in the fucking shower for forty minutes because I had never felt such hollowness before. How silly, how stupid, for me to only know love by the pain I felt after it was over. If I only could have…. been more sure. The day before she really left I looked at her and I knew. God, she was stunning. I told her so. I went to kiss her, just on the cheek, and she looked down. I finally knew I loved her and she looked down. The next morning she woke up early, and when I woke I found her frantically shoving what little she had into her suitcase. She was crying. She looked devastated. I didn’t know at the time, that it was forever I mean. As I sat in our tiny, tiny bed, so fucking confused, she walked over, kneeling, sobbing. She said, “baby I have to go.” I told her she didn’t, that she couldn’t, please couldn’t she stay, please Grace, please. She zipped up her suitcase and, without even a goodbye, walked out the door. I’m so dumb, I didn’t believe she would. It wasn’t until I heard the front door shut that I got up. I’ve never ran so fast, I’ve never been so scared. I didn’t want the one who smelled like lavender and thunder to leave me. I couldn’t wait for the elevator so I ran down all eight flights of stairs, barefoot, in my pajamas. She was getting into the taxi when I finally caught her. I was having a goddamn asthma attack– and not just from running. I told her, for the first time ever, that I loved her. I told her I was scared too, but I couldn’t do this, any of this, without her. She stared straight ahead, weeping, unable to even look at me. Do you know what it’s like to have the one person you love most not even look at you? I fucking loved her and she left, she left, she left. And she loved me too, she loved me too, she loved me too. Her damn father. I– I wish I could go back. He let her think the world hated her, that I was the devil, that she would rot for all eternity just for wanting to kiss me! He let her think I was using her but I loved her! To this day she is still in all of my dreams. Last night she stabbed Nathan. The night before she was just driving down the freeway, and I was in the car next to her, shouting. She couldn’t hear me.

The next summer I moved home. I met a boy who looked at me like my eyes were stars, and three weeks later he fucked my sister at a party. She didn’t know about him, and I’ve never seen a guilt like that, especially in a girl who used to smile at the roses in front of her grandparents’ house. I was going to key his car before I came back to Berkeley. I showed up at his house at four in the morning and knelt down, ready to spill my grievances into his sedan. The sun was about to rise. There were daffodils growing. I couldn’t do it. I wept ten feet away from the front porch.

Death looks sweet sitting here in front of me. It looks like relief. Gauging its weight, I turn the knife over in my palms. My reflection in its blade looks like a creature unlike myself. I like it. My mouth tastes sweet. But it frightens me too much, because a large piece of me still believes that I will find Heaven’s evil twin waiting on the other side for me, especially if the Catholic choir and Grace’s father is right.

Five months later I met Nathan at a party. God, he was so drunk. I was sharing an apartment with my friend in the city, and by the time the party ended he was so far gone that I took him home with me. He passed out on my bed and I slept on the floor. When he woke up the next morning, hung-over, guilty, and surprisingly attractive, he asked if he could make it up to me by taking me to breakfast. The whole time I sat at the table with him, all I could think about was how different our “meet-cue” was from mine and Grace’s. I met her in an art history class. I noticed the way her eyes lit up every time our professor talked about Impressionism and the feelings in my chest surprised me. We ran into each other at the Museum of Modern Art where I was desperately trying to understand the appeal of paintings that seemed like nothing more than splatters when I ran into her. She spent the rest of the night speaking with a passion that nearly terrified me, mainly because I didn’t understand it at first. Art was her specialty, she explained. She was a photographer, but she would give anything to be able to draw like Van Gogh. She asked if she could photograph me and I laughed as the flash went off and we were kicked out of the exhibit. In the following months we went to all the museums in the city, to all the new exhibits.

Conversely, on our first date, Nathan and I discussed politics and foreign policy. With me being an aspiring political journalist, it was more up my alley. He was safe. He’s leaving to Georgetown tomorrow afternoon to study law. I’m attracted to him. He’s a good man. He’s a really good man. When I was younger my mom used to kiss my palms before I went to school, so I had “a piece of her to hold with me all day.” She hasn’t hugged me since I was thirteen years old. I told Nathan that once. Last night as we discussed his flight he lifted my left palm to his face. Gently, kindly, so softly it almost hurt, he pressed his lips to the center of my hand. And that’s when I finally thought that maybe this life wouldn’t be so bad.

He doesn’t know everything about Grace. He doesn’t know in the moment of the first time I kissed him, he was the only thing on my mind, but ten minutes later, walking home alone, my thoughts lingered on her. My first kiss with her was behind a church, ironically enough. Both of us were high enough to not care if friends of her pastoral father spotted us. Nate doesn’t know that she cried when she first admitted she had feelings for me because she was so afraid that she felt something so “sinful.” He doesn’t know that the reason I sobbed on the bus ride home from mine and his six-month “anniversary” date wasn’t because I was worried about my father, but because I saw her. From that damn bus window I could see her, two-hundred feet away, laughing with a group of friends, so fucking happy. He doesn’t know that she turned and saw me too, staring from the inside of a city bus. My heart skipped a beat and I cried like a goddamn child because I realized that she still held onto the organ pumping blood through my veins, no matter how many times I tried to convince myself otherwise, tried to convince my heart to stop beating. I’m too afraid to tell him how hung up on her I still am, because I shouldn’t be, right? Three years and I should be done with her. He doesn’t know that when he proposed to me I wondered if she was going to have a happy ending. Two weeks ago, when he slipped the ring on my finger, just outside of the hospital where I was treated for a suspected concussion I sustained while riding a bike, I paused on my memories of her. No, he thinks that I’m his. I feel awful about everything. I want to be able to love him the way I loved her, the way he loves me, but I can’t. I’m terrified that he’ll leave me but I would understand if he did. I was so lonely when I first met him. But I’m not anymore. He’s a good man.

Suddenly, I feel an overwhelming urge to turn around. Maybe looking at the red-haired, blue-eyed man behind me will help me get over the ebony-skinned saint I once loved. He’s gorgeous. I could write sonnets about the freckles dotting his back. My heart swells, just a little bit. And there is my answer. I have to live. I need to live. I cannot leave my fiery, freckled fiancée. I get up, slowly, and walk the knife back to the counter, the soles of my feet sticking slightly to the tile as I walk. I feel my face turn hot, my vision blur. I’m crying. I turn to find Nathan barely lucid, staring at me.
“Babe what’s wrong?” he questions groggily.

I smile, wiping away my tears. “Nothing baby, nothing at all. I’m just going to miss you.” He pulls back the covers, gesturing me to come back to bed. I oblige, wanting the safety that accompanies sharing a bed with another warm body. Leaning into him, my cheek resting against his chest, I mentally try and assure myself that this is where I belong. He loves me and I care about him and the sex is good and no one glares at us in public and he calls me ‘sunshine’ and I know I’ll be content with him. He’s safe, and I’m going to marry him. Maybe one day I can love him. Real love too. He’s going to father my children and we’ll both have good jobs and he’ll call my dad ‘sir’ and shove cake in my face at our wedding and we’ll be content and wear matching Halloween costumes and make each other breakfast in bed on our respective birthdays. He’ll read our children books in his “Oxford-English” type voice and build them a bunk bed and act like he loves their homemade gifts and it will be good, it will be typical, it will be safe, and neither of us will ever know how it feels to have the one you care for stolen. Contentedness isn’t so bad right? Not everyone can have their fairy tales.