It’s been a year since you died but somehow you’re still here.
Mostly thanks to the Friends, the Magic Circle. They can’t stop talking about you. Christ, you should hear them. I think we all know what Alex would say! Behaving like you’re still alive but momentarily out of sight. Upstairs say, or out in the garden. Even down in the cellar looking for an entertaining bottle of red.
Is it a deliberate attempt to keep you in our lives? Can’t they cope with the reality of your absence? I don’t think I’ve heard any of them use the D Word. Although, to be fair they always had the best of you. Your dark side you reserved for me, for when we were alone. If they had witnessed your moods, the things you would say and do, would they even have believed it? Or pretended it wasn’t happening? Changed the subject?
I was so confused. If all these intelligent, fashionable people love you, can you really be that bad? Am I just overreacting?
I will never understand why I stayed as long as I did. You had such a hold on me, a malignant glamour. You dazzled me from the off, that first meeting a classic thunderbolt. Or Coup de foudre as you always insisted, because why use English when you can use French? Engaged in a matter of days, married within a month. What you saw in me, I’m still not sure. Was I so different from everybody else you knew? An innocent, a naif to throw at the jaded palates of all your sophisticated friends? Or merely a way to wind them up?
Such resentment when you introduced me to them. The steely smiles, the gritted teeth. What were they afraid of? That I would somehow take you away from them?
You were married to them long before you ever met me, why did it take me so long to see it? I could never hope to compete with them, our love was never going to last. You wore it out, drove it from me. As you drove away my friends.
With the benefit of hindsight, the Friends were as much a prison as anything else. Was I perhaps your last attempt to escape? If so, then I failed. As any flower deprived of light and nourishment must fail. In the end, they won. They seduced you back. And even when you died they simply refused to let you go, their hold over you virtually complete. How ironic, that you are still alive to them while I’m the ghost.
So here we are. A year since you died. To the day. The same blackbirds, singing the same songs. And here am I, back again to wait before your grave, the plain, classical stone. They will all be here soon, the Friends. I haven’t arranged it, I didn’t have to. They are nothing if not predictable. Miss an opportunity to commemorate your passing and proclaim their sorrow to the world? I think we all know what Alex would say.
Fat chance.
I know you can’t hear me… or can you? You have such power, why else is your name always on their lips? A vampire, refusing to die. Chained to life, however unwillingly.
They will not be pleased to see me. In the months since you died, they were clearly expecting me to walk away, leave you in their tender care. But I refused to admit defeat, no matter how much I detest their company. Playing the grieving widow, rubbing it in their faces strangely enjoyable.
But the time has come. You used to taunt me that I’d never find someone after you. But I’ve managed it. He’s nothing like you, that’s all I’m going to say.
So today will be our final meeting. Today the Friends will finally hear some home truths. I have no proof, as such. No letters to show them, in your unique italic hand, no recordings to play for them. Only my memories of what you would say about them, once they’d left at the end of an evening.
The nicknames you gave them, so apt, so cutting. At first they made me laugh, but over time they made me question: these are your friends? Why would you give them such spiteful names? And what might you be saying about me when you were alone with them?
Today it’s time for the dead to speak ill of the living. The Friends would never believe me, but I know they’ll believe you. Your words, your unmistakable turn of phrase. I think we all know what Alex would say!
It has to be done, I have to break the spell. And I’m not doing it to be unkind, far from it. I can’t risk any spark of you remaining in someone’s heart to tie you to existence.
This? Just a rose to lay upon your grave. There, doesn’t that look tasteful? Rosewood has power, they say. Power to keep the restless dead in their graves. Symbolic, but it will have to do. Time for you to die, sweetheart. And for me to return to life.
DoubleSpeak 