In the End

A short personal narrative

“Just open your mouth and breathe in,” Emily whispered, taking a deep breath.
I nodded in agreement. The cherry end of her cigarette glowed bright, like it was its own little sun in the pitch darkness behind the shed, the one my stepfather had started to build three or four years ago, but never finished. The March air was damp, and what remained of the winter snow had already soaked through my thin blue Chucks. Even then, I couldn’t tell if it was the cold that was really making me tremble, or if it was the excitement at the idea of her lips against mine. They were warm, even in the frigid two am cold, when she sealed them against mine. I followed her instructions, inhaling her breath as slowly as I could, careful not to cough as the smoke found its way into my lungs. I pictured it in my mind, that swirling gray bridge that we had created between us, how easily it moved from her to me, how naturally. When I couldn’t breathe in anymore, I slowly exhaled through my nose, never pulling my mouth from hers, and we transitioned seamlessly from shot-gunning cigarette smoke to kissing. This was the first time I kissed Emily. The first time I had kissed anyone. It was something I had been waiting for since she thrust that black and white composition notebook into my arms back in December, with the words Happy Birthday Brett written on the front cover in Sharpie. It was the year I turned fifteen.
“Your gift is in here,” she had whispered, standing in the doorway of my parent’s house, her father waiting in the driveway.
I guess this was where it all really started. In this notebook, with the picture that was hidden in a sea of endless white pages. The picture sketched in dark black ink, with sloppy scribbles that, only in the context of the whole, became art. The image of two flowers, who’s stems weren’t stems but instead were the links of chains. They were both wilting. They were prisoners. I understood it. Those flowers were us, chained in place and dying. The smaller of the two was talking. In the little conversation bubble that hovered above it, she had scrawled the words, I think I’m falling in love with you. Please don’t fuck it up. As quickly as I had read them, those five words became my existence, the very definition of my purpose. Please don’t fuck it up. It was all I ever thought about. I obsessed over every move, every comment, how I could bend my identity to fit that phrase, to fit her. I learned as fast I could. I became patient. I understood her eccentricities, and I never let them both me. Even on the hot summer afternoons, when we would get high at Jacob’s house, and I’d watch and listen as she would play a game where she tried to get him to get a hard on, taunting him, rubbing his thighs, pulling her shirt up, or maybe even showing him the intricate patterns on whatever underwear she was wearing that day. She always won, dancing on the very razor’s edge of infidelity, and I never said anything, and I never would.
“I’m just fucking with him,” she would laugh.
“I know,” I would chuckle.
“And I like to hurt you.”
“I know,” I would chuckle again.
And then she would become quiet and still. She would position herself so that she was directly in front of me, tilting her head upward to hold eye contact, and whisper with sincerity something like, “good. You have to know that. You have to know that you’re my life blood, my umbilical cord in this womb. That without you, I would be dead. You have to understand that.”
And I did. It was our greatest commonality, what we meant to each other. I was her life blood because she was mine. It was why, even in the most painful moments, I knew that it was really only us that existed to each other. That nobody else carried even a sliver of consequence, not really. And I knew that I was the only one who she would really ever claim. That I alone was the one lucky enough to reap the real rewards, and never so much as the night that she sent that text, Hey. Can you come over tonight?
It was midnight, but I couldn’t say no. Don’t fuck it up. When my mother and stepfather had fallen asleep, I walked out of the front door, easily and quietly, and began the eight mile walk to where she lived. It was less painful than I had imagined and I enjoyed every step of it the first time, and every time after. I’ve made that walk so many times that I can still see the landmarks in my head; the bent guard rail, the abandoned farm house, the spray-painted speed limit sign where the fives were made to look like eights. Two hours in the cricket quiet of the late-night hours, breathing in the summer humidity and chain smoking, counting the worn yellow lines along the northeastern country road, surrounded by the silhouettes of trees cast by the moonlight, losing count whenever she would text me to make sure I was still on my way. I always will be, I would say. I loved that walk, but really, it was always about the destination.
Her family’s house was a small, two-story built sometime in the early eighteenth century that sat back from the road so that the entire shell of the house was nothing more than an outline in the moonlight, even in the presence of the streetlights that dotted the little town. With the only light source that of a candle in a small window in the corner of the house, which I could see from the road, faintly dancing against the drawn curtains, I could almost imagine myself in that era. Emily always burned a candle. A signal fire. I slunk through the grass, keeping my footsteps quiet, like a common criminal. Even knowing that I was coming, she was startled by the small taps on the glass.
“Hey,” she whispered with a smile, and before I could respond, her mouth was on mine.
She pulled me into her bed. Our clothes were already off when I grasped the gravity of the situation, when I knew what was about to happen. We were wrapped up in each other. A runaway train, my nerves trembling like the tracks. She left the window open and the occasional breeze that would drift in made me aware of how much the temperature had risen by our body heat, by our breath, like being closed in a coffin. She was prepared, smooth and confident. She liked the upper hand, valued my surprise, my fragility in the moment. It was the first time for both of us, but you’d never know. I felt like I did in kindergarten, when all of the other kids knew how to tie their shoes, but my mom hadn’t taught me, and she knew it, and I knew that she knew it. It was one of her biggest turn-ons, control. I was so terrified, I had to fake finishing, quickly stuffing the condom in my jeans pocket.
“How did it feel?” She asked, perched by the window, still nude, lighting a cigarette like in an old film.
“Indescribable,” I smiled, still breathing heavily, and sitting next to her, taking a drag. She had no idea, the small detail she missed humanized her for me in that moment, and only for that moment, she didn’t seem like a goddess. I never did tell her. Even in the absence of climax, I still felt the change on the walk home that morning. Something inside of me had come to life, or died, or both.
As summer wound down, and school started, and the leaves began to change colors, and the brisk fall temperatures blanketed the atmosphere with a refreshing relief, Emily and I stayed the same. Since that night, it was like I was trying to feed an appetite that just couldn’t be satisfied, and I never dared to say no, even in the most uncomfortable of situations. Like when she wore a skirt to her family’s Thanksgiving dinner at her grandmother’s house, which her parents were so kind to invite me to, so that she could sneak me into the bathroom and make it easy. She was always braver than I was.
Her constant desire for sex is something that most teenage boys wouldn’t complain about. And a little discomfort was a small price to pay for being in love the way we were. It wasn’t at all what the movies and books tried to peddle. It wasn’t the kind of love that is foundational and lasting, it didn’t provide any comfort or haven or feeling of security. That’s how I knew it was real, because of its gravity. Because of the incessant state of fear, of anxiousness, of panic that it created. Like an emperor who’s conquered the richest, most beautiful piece of land imaginable, but can’t enjoy having it for fear of losing it. That’s love. It’s being insecure, knowing your inadequate, living in discomfort, obsessing about the fragility of it all. The sex was just one more thing to magnify it, one more way for me to fall short, one more lovely thing that made me certain it was all going to unravel. It did.
It was my seventeenth birthday, a sort of anniversary in my mind. I always pinpointed the start of our relationship to the day I saw that drawing. Two years of bliss. She had just finished spitting me out; a birthday gift that only she could have given me.
“I fucked Dave,” she said.
“What?” I asked, perplexed and still drying myself off of her saliva.
“Dave,” she repeated, “the guy that works at that flower shop downtown. I slept with him. I’m sorry.”
My face reddened. I could feel the hot tears welling up. My hands balled into tight fists. My body processed her words faster than my brain. My thoughts were a carousel of emotions.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“I don’t know what to say,” I managed to choke out.
“Say something,” she pleaded.
“I need some time,” I managed, pulling my coat on.
“You’re not going to leave me,” she said, “I won’t let you.”
Her voice was heavy with desperation. I started to stand while Emily began rummaging through the old vanity that sat against her wall. Before I could manage to get myself to the door, she was standing there, the left sleeve of her shirt pushed up and bunched tightly around her elbow, her right hand holding a razor blade against the wrist of her left.
“If you need to know that I love you, I’ll show you right now,” she said, tears beginning to roll down her own cheeks. “It’s not something I’ll ever do again. I promise.”
We stood in silence, watching each other cry. I wondered if she knew that she still had the power. I’m sure she did. In the moments that passed, I convinced myself that she was only testing me. She always tested me, measured my devotion. I could have walked out right then, tested her myself, found out if she really would have done it. I didn’t.
“I’m not going to leave you,” I relented.
She turned the blade horizontal and swiped with one quick motion.
“What are you doing?” I gasped.
“Vertical cuts are what kills you,” she said, the blood running and wrapping around her wrist until gravity snatched it up, yanking it to the ground in messy drops that began dotting the old hardwood floors, “now we both hurt.”
I could feel the blood soak through my shirt when she wrapped her arms around me. It was warm and nauseating. I cleaned the gash on her wrist, bandaged it and wrapped it tightly in gauze and called my brother for a ride home, where I called Laura, who warmly welcomed me to come visit her, the same way she always did. I stole a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the center console of my stepfather’s car, and walked through the December cold to Laura’s house, my bare arms reddened and stinging by the time I made it.
Laura and I stayed up late into the night, smoking and sharing a bottle of cheap red wine she swiped from her parents’ alcohol cabinet.
“Happy birthday,” she said with a smile, holding the bottle up to the moonlight that shone through her window in the otherwise dark room, and took a long gulp.
“You know,” I said, pausing for my turn to let gravity pull the sweet liquid down through my throat, “I think you’re the first person today to say those two words to me.”
“No,” she said sheepishly, “what about Emily?”
“Emily let me know that she slept with someone else,” I scoffed.
“She told me,” Laura said, her voice consoling and relieved.
“Really?”
“I was going to tell you. I just wanted you to hear it from her instead of me. Are you guys done then?”
“No,” I shook my head.
“How can you not be?” she snapped, “It’s the shittiest thing she could do to you.”
“That’s love,” I shrugged, “sometimes it hurts.”
“It shouldn’t.”
There was a heavy silence between us. I was waiting for a speech, the same speech Laura had given me so many times before, about Emily, and my relationship, about how fucked up we both were. She never gave that speech.
“You should kiss me,” Laura said, finally breaking the silence, with a stern voice that was confident and demanding, her eyes fixed on mine.
I thought it was my anger, my resentment, my desire to get even that drove me to place my hands on her cheeks, warm and red, and pull her face into mine, I can still remember the strangeness of it all. The awkward feel of her unfamiliar lips against mine, the scent of her like PlayDoh, her radiating body heat. Our lips stayed pressed together. When she finally pulled away from me, I could see the wetness in her eyes, glistening puddles on a stretch of empty highway. She smiled, her teeth showing, crooked and short and perfectly flawed. I stood, making out her form in the darkness, her thighs thick from years of volleyball, her size sturdy, though not overweight. This was the first time I ever really looked at her. The first time I ever really noticed how pretty she really was. The first time I looked at her with desire.
“I love you,” she whispered, “I really love you.”
I felt nauseous. Don’t fuck it up. I clung to those four words. They were my bible, my one and only commandment, and I had violated it.
“I can’t,” I murmured.
It would be years before I could reconcile that this moment, this exact point in time, was the turning point of my life’s arc, that at this very second I was already beginning my descent, and I was completely oblivious. By the time I had realize it, it was too late for me to tell her that I was wrong, and that I’m sorry.