13. Tristan #3
“The song I started that night… the new one, the one I began playing before it all went wrong, it’s called Lilies in the Dark.
It’s the song I just sang earlier. I wrote it for our anniversary.
That’s what you were supposed to hear. That’s what I was trying to give you, and I did it so badly…
so backward, that I lost you doing it. I spent so long making you a monument to how much I loved you that I forgot to just…
be there. Love you out loud. In the room. Where you actually were.”
I stop. I’ve said it all now. The whole shape of it, laid out in the dark between us.
“Anyway…” I say quietly, when she doesn’t speak. “That’s the truth. I just wanted you to know it. All of it.”
Liliana doesn’t answer.
The silence stretches out, and stretches further. I lie there with my heart in my throat and slowly convince myself she’s fallen asleep, that I’ve been confessing my whole soul to a woman who drifted off two minutes ago.
And strangely, it doesn’t feel like a loss. It feels closer to setting down a weight I’ve hauled up a hundred flights of stairs. Even if she didn’t hear a word, I finally said it. All of it, out loud, to her. That’s more than I’ve managed in years.
I close my eyes and let the rain start to pull me under.
“The floor is hard.”
Her voice, soft, out of the dark. I open my eyes.
“You slept on it half the night already, and you got rained on before that.” A pause, and when she speaks again it’s quieter, almost a whisper, as if she’s not sure she should be saying it at all. “You can come up here… If you want. There’s room.”
I lie there for one stunned second, certain I misheard.
Then I sit up so fast I crack my head straight into the corner of the nightstand.
“Ow, fuck. Damn it…”
Her laugh bursts out of her above me, startled and bright and real, the first genuine laugh I’ve heard from her since everything went down, and suddenly it’s worth every bit of the stars bursting behind my eyes.
“Easy,” she says, and I can hear the grin in it. “The offer’s not going anywhere. You don’t have to concuss yourself.”
“Worth it,” I mutter, rubbing my head, and I’m grinning too, I can’t help it, my whole face is doing it. “Absolutely worth it.”
Then I climb up onto the bed carefully, and she’s put a pillow down the middle, a soft neutral border between her side and mine which I respect completely.
I settle onto my back on my half, close enough to feel the warmth of her, far enough that the pillow stays exactly where it is. We lie there in the dark, both of us facing the ceiling, the storm easing to a steady patter outside.
“I was so lonely,” she says.
It lands quiet and plain in the dark.
No drama in it, just the truth, and I make myself hold still and listen.
“In our marriage… At the end. I was lonelier inside it than I ever was single.”
She’s quiet a moment.
“And the thing I figured out, after staying here, is that somewhere along the way I made you my whole world. My entire life just… narrowed down to waiting for you. And when you weren’t there, I had nothing left, because I’d let everything else go.
That wasn’t fair to put on you, maybe… But it’s what happened. ”
A pause and a breath. “So I’m learning how to have a self again. How to not drown just because one person isn’t in the room. It’s slow. But I’m doing it, and it feels like coming up for air.”
Every instinct I have wants to apologize, to explain, to defend, to fix.
I don’t. I’ve finally learned that some things don’t want fixing, they just want witnessing.
“I’m glad,” I say, and I mean it all the way down. “I’m really glad, Lily. You should have a whole life that’s yours… You always should have.”
She turns her head toward me on the pillow. I feel it more than see it.
“That’s a very different answer than you would have given a year ago.”
“I’m a very different man than I was a year ago.” I turn my head too, until we’re facing each other across the pillow in the dark. “Took me losing everything to get here. Which is its own kind of stupid. But here I am.”
After that, we talk.
I don’t even know how it starts exactly, or when it turns, but somewhere in there the weight lifts off both of us and we’re just talking, the way we used to before any of this. Before the fame and the distance and the ruin.
Nothing important, everything important. The terrible movie she’s been pretending to watch with Danica. The disaster of a song I heard on the radio last week. A memory from the cabin. Whether her cousin will actually murder me in the morning.
Small stupid ordinary things, the kind of conversation I forgot we were ever capable of, the kind that costs nothing and means everything.
Lily laughs more than once. So do I. The pillow stays between us and neither of us moves it, and somehow that makes it better, safer, as if we’ve agreed to just be two people in the dark remembering how to like each other.
The candle burns down to nothing. The rain fades to a whisper and then to silence. The sky outside the window goes from black to charcoal to the first thin gray of dawn, and still we’re talking, slower now, our words stretching out, the gaps between them going soft and long.
“You’re falling asleep,” she murmurs at some point, amused.
“’M not,” I lie, my eyes already closed.
“You are. You just told me the cat’s name was Tuesday. The cat did not have a name. It was a feral rooftop cat.”
“Felt like a Tuesday,” I mumble, and she laughs again, quieter now, half asleep herself.
And there in the gray light of a brand-new morning, with the storm passed and my wife an arm’s length away with a pillow between us that neither of us needed to move.
Then I feel myself finally letting go, sliding under, closer to her than I’ve been in months. The distance between us, all those miles I built with my own two hands, closing by the smallest, most impossible degree.
I fall asleep to the sound of her breathing.
And it is the best sleep I have had in a very, very long time.