(Age 29)

It’s 3 am.

Your perfume is on everything.

On me.

On our entire world.

It permeates the cotton sheets of our bed. It clings to the collar of my blue work shirt that I can’t bear to wash, and the pretty purple scarf draped across the dressing table mirror – the one you wore to the shops just a few days ago and you laughed because it matched the colour of your swollen ankles.

Your shoes sit unworn in the hallway.

Your coat hangs uselessly on the peg behind the door.

By day, you’re a black hole that I manoeuvre around, never getting too close to the edge. By night, I tumble over and fall straight in, the inky emptiness of its bottomless depths consuming me whole.

Your perfume is on everything.

Why does it get to stay when you left?

I blink at the harsh sunlight that bathes our bedroom. The curtains are wide open, just as they were when I found you.

Rolling my head to the side, I watch the lights on the baby intercom run from specks of green, to yellow, all the way up to a warning signal of red. Over and over they complete the sequence.

Flicker – three green dots.

Flicker – three green dots followed by three yellow.

Flicker – three green dots, three yellow, three red.

A cautionary traffic light of distress.

He’s crying, likely screaming.

I can’t hear him because I’ve shut off that sense. I’ve closed the receptors in my ears, and blocked out all noise.

Plus, I have the intercom on mute.

I should be ashamed.

He needs me, and I’m not there.

Eight days old and he’s already being ignored by the one person who should always be there for him. The only person left who created him. His only parent.

He’ll only ever know one parent.

We brought him home from the hospital yesterday. The house was swarming with family and visitors, with strangers who observed me, who made notes about my mental wellbeing, who judged my ability to father my children. Who watched with sharp eyes as I handed my kids to anyone who would have them – my mother, my father, Isaac, Liam, Nate… anyone.

If I felt guilt, I could assuage the emotion by telling myself that they are safe and with family, with people who will love and care for them. The truth is, I feel nothing.

I am empty.

I’m past the point of pain. My muscles and my emotions still bruised but quickly turning numb.

Comfortably numb.

I can exist like this.

I can breathe like this.

And if I’m really lucky, I can sleep like this because sleep is when all the pain and numbness disappears and everything is how it is meant to be, how life should be.

I kiss her goodbye in the morning. She smiles as she grips my hand tightly, refusing to let go of it when I attempt to step away from the bed and readjust the tie she messed up with her wandering hands. Her white blonde hair is a tangled mess across the bed sheets, her pinkest of pink lips shine from my kiss. Her belly is round and swollen with our baby. Her smile. Her smile. Her smile.

It’s life.

“Josh, darling. Can you feed the baby while I make us breakfast?”

My mother’s fake cheer seeps through the crack in the bedroom door, and the air in my chest solidifies. Her hand grips the frame, her body patiently staying outside and waiting for her son to come back to her, waiting for him to stand up and be a man.

I ignore her and turn my head away from the frenetically flashing lights and her piteous tone.

“Josh, I know you’re awake,” she all but whispers as she cautiously steps over the threshold of the room. She doesn’t want to come in here. She doesn’t want to see me lying on the same, unwashed sheets on which I found my wife cold, limp and unresponsive. She doesn’t want to accept that I’d take my last breath on these sheets if I could.

Today.

I’d happily take that last breath today.

“He’s crying for you, Josh.”

I can’t hear him.

“He needs you.”

He needs her. I need her.

“She wouldn’t want this, Josh,” she forces out through barely contained sobs.

That gets her a reaction but not one she expects or if my mind was that of a sane man, one that she deserves.

“She? She?” I all but roar, my body flipping up off the mattress causing my mother to rear back in shock.

“She has a fucking name, mother. Laura. Laura. Let me hear you say it. L-A-U-R-A.”

I stand and stalk towards her, my eyes tearing into the face of the woman who birthed me, who gave me life and loves me unconditionally. I ignore the anguish painting her familiar, loving face in lines of pure grief and continue using her as a punching bag.

“Why can’t you say her name, mother? Is it because she’s not here? Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know what my wife wants?”

She stands herself up against the dressing table, the back of her knees catching on the small padded stool, her expressive eyes, so much like mine, wide, watery and filled with devastation laced with a heavy dose of fear.

“Don’t you dare come in here and tell me what my wife wants. You hear me? Are my words registering?”

I know I’m scaring her and I just don’t care.

I want her out of this room. Want her words out of range of my ears. Want her knowing eyes off my face and her thick and syrupy concern off my skin.

“Get out,” I warn, my voice flat and without emotion. “Leave this house, take the kids if you want, leave the kids if you want, I don’t care.”

I glare at her, letting the harsh punch of my words sink in. Watching her intensely as she fights to control her need to shake me, slap me or comfort me.

“Josh,” a stern voice calls from the open doorway.

Isaac.

“Get her out, Iz. Get all of them out of my house and leave me the fuck alone.”

My words may be aimed at him but my eyes never break the connection with my mother. I stare unmoved as she loses her fight against the wetness pooling along her lower lashes. The clear trickle of pain carves grooves across the softness of her cheeks.

And still, I feel nothing.

She blinks, more scalding rivers of hurt tumble from dark brown eyes.

“We love you, Josh,” crackles from her trembling lips. “We will take all your ugly and your pain and not judge you for any of it. We will not tell you your anger is unwarranted. We will not demand you to let it go. There is no cure for grief,” she admits and reaches out tentatively to touch me, but I take a step back, watching as her hand falls impotently to her side.

My eyes flit briefly to the door to see it empty, Isaac likely attending to the cause of the flickering lights on the intercom and my gaze returns to my mother’s puffy and worry stained face. No remorse flows through me knowing that another man tends to my children. No empathy for the pain etched across the face of the woman before me. Nothing.

I am hollow.

“The only thing you can do is grieve. In your own time, without the limits forced on you by another. If we can do only one thing for you, my son, let us give you that,” she finishes.

Her legs carry her slowly towards the door, not waiting for me to demand her departure once more. She turns her back to me when she crosses the threshold into the hallway beyond, quietly closing the door behind her.

I stand, anaesthetized once more.

Alone.

No spectrum of lights igniting my anger.

No words of wisdom pinching at my over-sensitised skin.

With heavy limbs, I climb back into the bed that smells like her. My sore and itchy eyelids close once, twice, three times. My body curves around her phantom form, feeling the heat of her skin against mine, the tickle of her hair across my face and the soothing motion of her sleep-heavy breaths.

I crave this moment at the edge of sleep when everything feels real enough to allow me to sink into dreams; where she will meet me with laughing eyes.

Laura Smiles.

And I smile back.

Here in this bed, it’s just her and me.

I drift off to the feel of her in my arms and ignore the ache in the back of my head that tries to remind me I’ll just lose her again when I open my eyes.

Laura, I’ll never open my eyes again.

You have my words.

You have my heart.

Take my eyes for they will never want to land on another person but you.