These are the secrets I have yet to tell:
She bought me flowers last weekend. A bunch of orchids, white
and spotted with red, like beads of blood on creamy fabric.
Orchids are my favourite flower. She thinks they look like
the genitalia of a weird space alien but she’d buy them for me anyway.
This will be the first time I’ve spent more than ten pounds
on flowers for her.
Sometimes when we had sex I’d start crying because I was
stressed, or angry, or because I felt she wasn’t enjoying herself. She’d hold
me, and kiss my face, and tell me that whatever it was, it was okay. She’d lace
her fingers into mine and whisper that she loved me.
When she said that I never believed her. Not even once.
I lied to her all the time. Never about anything big, but
sometimes about traffic accidents or incidents at work.
I loved her, but I love myself more.
I’ve never liked taramasalata. I only ever ate it so that
I’d seem adventurous to her.
I think she settled for me.
I hated her sometimes.
I love her. Present tense.
The smell of her was like an orchid, or ozone, or orange
zest and red wine. If, while she was out, I caught a snatch of it in the flat
I’d sometimes stop still for minutes at a time trying to get it back again. It
still happens but not for much longer.
I hated the way she loaded the dishwasher. In fact I believe
that no woman knows how to do this correctly.
I miss her so much that it often feels like someone has
forced a broken Coke bottle into my lungs, so that every time I breathe it’s a
fresh laceration, an internal mincing of the organs which give me breath.
I like this feeling. I’d feel guilty without it.
I hate her dad.
I don’t remember exactly what the last thing we said to each
other was before she got in the car.
I tried to download all her videos on Facebook last night
because I’m scared I’ll forget her voice.
I really, really hate her dad. At the funeral today he
glared at me. The sky was the only one not wearing black. I thought of her
favourite flower, irises. I thought of cyanide and the lips of suffocation
victims.
My underwear was bright red. It’s the pair she hated, but I
had nothing else clean.
Her mother came up to talk to me afterwards, looking wan and
cried out like the shadow of a woman. Her jaw was clenched. Grief makes people
very ugly.
“You’ll still… you’ll still be family,” she lied, “It’s not
even a question. You know that don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. It’s her fiction and she’s entitled to it.
Her dad glared at me over his wife’s shoulder. I didn’t look at him but I know
he was glaring because I could feel it. He didn’t say anything.
Her friends didn’t talk to me either. They didn’t approve of
me because I have no money, no ambition. She had enough ambition for both of
us. That was our greatest secret.
I taught her to lucid dream, to enjoy TV shows with guns, to
have sex without worrying that someone could hear her. She taught me... well.
Next to nothing. I was never a good student.
I loved her. I really loved her, and now she’s in the
ground. She hated the dress they buried her in but I didn’t say anything
because her mother gave it to her. She would have been so pissed with me, but I
figured, what’s one more secret? It’s not the big one.
The big one? It’s glaringly obvious to everyone in her life,
but that doesn’t mean you can say it aloud.
I don’t think she loved me. I don’t think she could have and
I guess I hated her for it. But I loved her.
Don’t tell anyone.
