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voidswithinvoids · 7 months ago

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Part III: Buried Memories

The drive back to his old house was about two and a half hours. There was once a time he would’ve longed for those stretches of time where he could be alone with himself. Being alone now felt harsher than it did before. It was as if living with someone threw off the discipline of being alone. Times of reflection were diminished into small talk, and meditation into bickering. Now he was completely out of practice and the aloneness was getting the better of him.

He was on his way down a wintered road. The sun was setting into a creamy calm hue but he barely minded to notice its beauty. Nor did he care for the gentle frost that cased the dormant wheat fields he passed. Mainly he listened to the sound of the car’s heater that blared his observable universe into a vacuum. In heartbreak and in pain, so much beauty becomes background noise.

His mind replayed inescapable memories. Indulging them, he basked in the suffering it brought him. Perhaps he thought it was just as well to be locked in a prison of memories. What else would his pathetic life amount to? Anyone could see by the eternal frown and puffy eyes that Vic had lost his light. That glowing warmth that once sang all the wrong words to American Pie on road trips. The silly dance he often performed when taking fresh cookies out of the oven. All of this had flickered out. The empty hum of the heater would continue on and nothing else.

Just down that road he just now passed was a treehouse that a man, decades ago, built for his children. It always seemed like a strange place to find such a large treehouse because there were no houses in walking distance. It stood alone with a window that over looked a small pond. It was there that he brought Fiona on their first date together. It felt like an eternity ago. He had borrowed an old picnic basket from his mom and had Julian get him some wine for the occasion. The basket was carefully packed with a charcuterie board, desserts, and small candles for after the sun had set. They sat in a lot of awkward silence that day but it was sweet and innocent. They threw rocks in the pond and listened for the heavy kaplunk their weight caused. A violent disturbance to an otherwise serene environment. He cursed even these good memories that came before him, for they brought him no solace.

The welcome sign to the city brought a shiver down his spine. Dreading the small words that he would exchange with her while he packed up his last small things that had been aimlessly abandoned within their own home. There would likely be no resolution today. Likely there would never be a resolution after the words that had been shouted during their last conversation. He didn’t have the will to ask for grace anymore. He felt as if he was made a fool to have loved her so dearly. Humiliated by the gooiness of making such an honest mistake.

He drove passed the coffee shops and the pubs they used to find themselves at when they first moved to the neighborhood. The emptied pool was gated up for the season but the two of them once jumped the fence for a midnight swim under a crescent moon on an unnaturally hot July night. The park trails that their dog would always seem to find the swampiest mud to roll around in, only to return home and shake droplets of brown sludge on eggshell white walls.

He had loved that house. There is a soft and sacred bond one partakes in when owning a house. Breaking the ground to grow flowers in the front. Washing dishes, scrubbing floors, patching holes. It was usually a bit messy, a bit wrong and out of place when Vic went about keeping his house. But he loved it for all it had offered him and all it had tried to promise.

Just a few more streets now and then a left at the crosswalk. Each house like orphaned strangers, all tucked under the same white bedsheet. Puffy grey clouds bellowed from rows and rows of chimneys. Just passed the house with the two large evergreens that stood like gentle giants whose arms outstretched towards the sky. And then there it was. The home he had left and locked the door not knowing it would be his last time. It was standing there in quiet darkness, on a night with no moon.

He turned the car off and let the new silence dissolve the vacuum world the car’s heater had been maintaining. He waited there a long time without moving. He waited until the cold crept back in and he could see his breath. He listened to the silence and thought of how the ringing in his ears felt like the loudest rendition of jingle bells. There was nothing else waiting for him so he continued to wait and watch the slowness of a street at night.

After the large portion of a long while, he took a deep breath and pushed the car door open and walked quickly towards the house. The fresh snowfall made the front porch look lumpy with snow. There had been a fresh layer that coated everything perfectly in white marshmallow, yet to be disturbed by scuffling feet.

His foot caught something heavy on the walk way up. Stumbling to the ground, Vic felt his hand move through a layer of snow and into a cardboard box. The snow stung his hand but the humiliation of tripping in front of your ex’s house was much worse. Trying to recover his composure he removed his hand from the box, but as he did he felt a soft something inside. He peered in to discover the teddy bear he had given to Fiona on her birthday one year. It was wet with snow that must have been sitting in the box for days.

His hand searched the box further to find the watch he only wore to weddings and funerals. His favourite mug he bought from a local market. A collection of DVDs he had watched over and over, even when Fiona was more than sick of them. He’d watch them and whisper the dialogue under his breath. Giggling at the same jokes and bawling his eyes out when they got too sad. There were books on plants and fish and bird watching. Near the bottom lay a poetry book about death completely soaked and ruined.

Vic’s face showed no signal of surprise. Nor anger or sorrow. If you were there to see it, his face showed quite nearly nothing but emptiness. As I have said, the light in his eyes had blown out long ago and this was just the last smothering of the wick.

His hand absentmindedly found the box he had tripped on and tore it open. It was full of photo albums and love letters. He saw the photo they took atop The Sleeping Giant, smiling and accomplished, as if they really had been on the top of the world. He remembered the bickering that followed that photograph. When the two of them took the wrong trail back and she threw her engagement ring into the bush somewhere in spite of him. It was likely the most immediate punishment she could have thought of. He spent hours searching for that ring, hoping that by some great chance some higher being would allow that thin gem to glimmer in the faded light. She walked back to the campsite and left him in the woods to search for that small symbol of eternity.

Beside that photo was a Christmas card from the year they had dressed up their dog like an elf. His ears poked up between the little green hat and an oversized toy candy cane was clenched in his teeth to make him look like he was smiling. That year, Fiona returned all the gifts he had boughten her. Perhaps gifts were simply not his strong suit. Perhaps that was just another shortcoming. And then he came upon a bundle of letters, unorganized and crumpled, at the bottom of the box. The first letter began:

Dear Vic,

Words cannot describe how much you mean to me. You’re sweet and loving, and no one can make me laugh like you do. In only a handful of months we’ll be married…

Another answered, frozen in space:

Dear Fiona,

Love of my life, you truly have made me a fool in love. I savour every minute I get to spend with you and wait impatiently for the hours to pass when we are apart. You make me so happy and I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you…

The flowery words made him shiver on the frozen pathway. He cradled the soft cardboard box in his arms. The still life of his dead romance staring up at him. He no longer recognized the penmanship. The hands that had inked those pages did not feel like they could have ever been Vic or Fiona’s. What other worldly creatures interacted in such suffocatingly romantic ways. He thought to himself how blatantly obnoxious and ignorant his words had felt. Certainly, she saw right through his desperate attempt for attention and love.

He looked up at the old house. The lights were off. Who knows how late it had become. He supposed it was just as well that she didn’t greet him. Save him the embarrassment of hobbling around the house looking for forgotten items. Save him the contorted way his face twisted when his dog licked his tears from his face. Perhaps he was there too and the two of them were watching and snickering from a darkened room. Naked in their lust for one another. Laughing at the physical comedy of a clumsy man falling into despair again and again.

He lay down in his bed of snow and the stars looked closer than usual. He felt like maybe if he just had a step stool or maybe the ladder from his shed, he could breeze his hand through that luminescent light. There was no movement in those pinhole lights in the dark sky. They were just as frozen as all these buried memories, lost in the snow. He wondered about the unchanging nature of these things and didn’t know what to make of it all. He found that there was too much he simply could not understand anymore.

There was nothing left to do in that place. No epiphany or resolve. He got up and uncovered three other boxes buried under snow. One by one he packed them into the backseat of his car. He didn’t mind the dirt and snow that clung to the bottom of the boxes. Of course, there was no need for these items anymore. No sacredness or romance lived in them anymore. But it bothered him to leave them there on the street like that. After all, he was just as discarded as they were.

Packing the last of the boxes in the car he crumpled and leaned his head against the steering wheel. Once again his tears flowed down his face as his teeth chattered in the cold of the car. He placed his mouth around the wheel’s handle and bit as the blood rushed to his face. He whimpered to himself and screamed and let the snot clog his nose. He punched the steering wheel and rocked himself in the dark. The drive back was a blur with the car packed full of memories. Inconsolably weeping; there was no safe haven to be found in the comfort of the car’s heater or the hot void that once cradled such deep despair. It was just him, and the aloneness was suffocating.

#memories #short story #fiction #heartbreak #winter

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