8. Midnight
Midnight
Ten Years Ago
A urelia’s skin is grey. It sets my teeth on edge. We’re only twenty—we should look youthful, vibrant. Isn’t that the greatest joy of being in your twenties? You get to drink yourself into oblivion, snort whatever concoction of drugs you want and fuck yourself silly, and there are no consequences.
Aurelia is growing steadily weaker, and greyer. The last month she’s barely had any energy.
It’s a sinuous truth I’ve been trying to avoid. I can’t anymore, though. It sucks at my skin like the ravenous jaws of a parasite. Gnawing repetitive thoughts burrow under my flesh. My brain itches and skitters. I need to get it out. Find out what is wrong.
I’ve rehearsed the conversation a million times. Played it this way and that. But I can’t seem to get the words out. It’s as if my subconscious has worked out the answer and my conscious doesn’t want to hear it.
I have to do something because Aurelia is shutting down.
Shutting me out.
We’re supposed to be each other’s everything. She is my everything. I don’t have anyone else. My parents are dead. I have no siblings, no aunts.
Aurelia is it.
She was with me when they died. We’d only been together a year, and she’d held me tight, cradling me through the long nights of tears and heartache.
She cooked for me and made me eat when I didn’t want to get out of bed.
She told me that even though they were gone, I’d never be alone because I’d always have her.
It felt like the truest thing I’d ever heard. The way those words curled around my heart, it was sacred—an unbreakable promise.
So why does it feel like a lie tonight?
Aurelia has seen me through my lowest moments, but tonight I realise I was naive for thinking it had bonded us. When you go through that kind of trauma, it either makes you or breaks you as a couple, right?
I thought it made us. Maybe it only made me.
“Aurelia,” I plead as I perch on the edge of the bed. “Please talk to me.”
I’m pathetic, needy. She’s the sick one and here I am, desperate for communication.
I’m met with the kind of pregnant pause that sends stony chills through a person. My lungs are heavy enough I struggle to breathe. She rolls over, turning away from me.
This is what hurts the most. There is something wrong and instead of leaning on me, she’s pushing me away. I don’t want to say the words out loud, but they cling to the air. It’s putrid, like the cloying rot of week-old rodents and festering tumours.
I reach over the bed to open the window and let some air in. But Aurelia slaps my hand out of the way.
“I’m cold,” she snaps.
I bite the inside of my lip, rehearsing the conversation again: Aurelia, please, I’m worried, we need to talk. There’s something wrong. Let me help you. Let me help us.
She pulls the cover over her shoulder, tugging her body further away from mine. I’m losing her. Our relationship is fading away. Why won’t she confront this?
That’s when I realise.
“Oh,” I breathe.
One syllable.
One word that cuts through the thick swell of unspoken words.
Through the bullshit.
Through our entire fucking relationship.
Funny how even as mortals, our lives seem long, and yet it’s not the decades that change everything, but the brief moments. The short words and shorter sentences that slip from our mouths like waves and sand. Smooth shores one second, waves obliterating us the next.
She flinches against my touch.
“You already know…?” I ask.
The silence that hangs between us is a dark, hungry maw devouring our relationship.
“It’s over,” she says.
Two short words.
One broken heart.
“What?” It’s all I have left. I’m gripping the bed sheets so hard my knuckles are stretched white over bone.
“Either I do it now, or my body does it for us in a couple of months.”
There it is.
The ugly truth.
“You’re sick?” It comes out like a question, but it’s a statement, an acknowledgement of what was held secret between us. Now it’s a bloated fact hanging as pungent in the air as her illness is in her body.
She flips over, her eyes colder than I’ve ever seen them.
“Not just sick. Dying, Midnight. So no matter what, it’s over. We. Are. Over. Today. Next week. In a couple of months’ time. Does it even matter? It’s done. You might as well get used to it.”
“Gods, Aurelia. You think I’d just fucking leave you? You think that I’d let you deal with this on your own? After everything we’ve been through?”
She rolls back over. “You need to leave.”
“Babe, please don’t shut me out. Not like this. What doctors have you seen? There has to be someone else. A second opinion.”
“Second. Third. And fourth. It’s terminal, Midnight. I won’t see next year. I wasted my life for nothing.”
I recoil. “We’re… We’re not a waste. What does that even mean?”
“I could have gone places. Done things. Instead, I tethered myself to you and spent what little time I had here dealing with you and your fucking emotions.”
My stomach hardens. My eyes grow cold with the press of wet tears. “You don’t mean that.”
“GET OUT,” she screams.
My chest cracks. Tears splash into the dimples my fingers make on the duvet.
Nothing can ever hurt like this.
Nothing.
She doesn’t mean those things. She’s hurting, and I understand that.
Aurelia will see next year.
I’ll make sure of it.