Spoiler! :
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(i)
This is what you think, as you set yet another one of his victories on paper: if your life was a story, it would not be a very interesting one. You think that of all the possible things to be you are the witness, or maybe the writer; the one who lingers, the one who gets left behind, the one who remembers; who holds conference with clear-eyed ghosts and pale spectres and never finds anything to say.
You think, there's nothing noteworthy about waiting, and I've been waiting forever.
This is what you do: you fall in love and then you wait. You're not sure how it happens. One day you just stop, and realize that for the past five years you've been living for someone else.
And you think about that, long enough for ink to dry and for the rain outside to stop falling and you decide that's more than alright with you.
(ii)
This is not the beginning. It's not an end either. You're stuck in the middle of this story and counting all the ways it could have come to this.
Here's a story about war: a man is coming back from far, far away. He is tired and ill and lonely, and because he feels that chance has not been fair to him he lets dice roll and fall from his shaking hands and bets on the underdogs and in all of this there is a silent question, and that question is What now?
Take all the things you've ever been afraid of. Take his name. Take hers. Take the ghosts, the sands, the light; the words you've said, the ones you haven't. The chances you've never had the courage to take.
Hold them close, hold them secret, hold them safe.
It's all you'll ever be able to do
The question is What now? and the answer comes in the shape of another man. Dark eyes, bright teeth: they clasp hands and just like that he is caught, and just like that he's said yes for the first time, and he never really stops.
(iii)
There are so many ways to say I love you. You think you might know all of them. But go ahead, write them down. Maybe you're still missing something.
Here is a story about life: there is a detective. There is a doctor. They live together, and so it goes, one of those children's tales of heroes and adventures and explosions (because one mustn't forget the explosions: fire roaring and splinters flying and light erupting, oh so much light, painting their silhouettes red and black over one another, in an apotheosis of adrenaline and laughter.)
Here is a story about war: the doctor has ghosts whispering insistent and solemn over his shoulders, and the detective alive and laughing in front of him, so he wants to reach out—of course he does.
In the grey morning that trickles in through the cracked windows and infiltrates itself into old wounds, shattered nerves and a heavy heart, he holds his hand back and wishes he had been braver, stronger, better. Perhaps then the ghosts would never have spoken. Perhaps then he could have been the ghost, silent feet and a voice like the wind across the sands. Things would have been easier that way, he thinks. The detective is laughing and sets a hand on his shoulder. Inside of him something is bubbling up.
It feels a lot like happiness, but he's been wrong before. Maybe it's just regret.
Here is a story about love: the doctor is smiling in spite of himself, even as he carries a last box full of ink-darkened notebooks out of the room and picks up the pieces of his heart he's scattered there over the years and years. There are many words swirling just out of reach right now: yes and no and I have to do this and I'm sorry and tell me something, anything, tell me a story. Please say something. The detective knows this. In his eyes there are those years of laughter and longing and if he were to ask now, the answer might not be no.
He knows this too, and for once he says nothing. He smiles, softer than ever before, and lets go.
(iv)
Don't stop writing. It's not over until you make it so. And there are so many stories here, for all that you refuse to think any of them might be yours.
Here is a story about love: there is a woman, standing under the moonlight. There is a man, bedsheets tangled at his feet. The woman smiles, sadly, and he has nothing to say. He thinks he dreamed about her once, before he met her, but he's not sure. Nights slip through the cracks of his mind like grains of sand through the tiny spaces between cupped fingers, and dreams like water lost to the dry, crackling heat of the desert.
That does not matter. The woman wears her smile like a favourite cloak, and in the silence that hangs like stars across the morning sky, unnatural but so very, very beautiful, the man remembers she has ghosts of her own too.
In the silence that spins in slow implacable circles the man comes to kneel at the woman's feet, and her hands on his face are lighter than the shadows crawling over their skin. This is not the end¸ she says, and he has never wanted anything more than to believe her tonight. John, she says, and around the lone syllable of his name her lips move like a prayer, like a blessing. This is not the end.
Here is a story about life: that night the man dreams of he that came before him and now lingers in every one of her smiles, every one of her sighs.
The man dreams of his wife's dead lover, and he says I don't want to take her from you, and the dead man answers, I know.
(v)
Take everything you've ever hoped for. Take his love. Take her laughter. Take the ocean, the foam catching the light and the dawn rising serene over it; take the rain against your windows at night, take silence. Take peace. Take the ring at your finger and the stories you've yet to write. Forge an armour out of them, or weave them into some tapestry; wrap them around you, and never let go.
In the grey morning that cloaks itself with fog and dirty rain you are walking alone, wearing a shirt a size too small and your hands still remembering the warmth of her hands. There are words still that have not been said, promises that have not been kept. Look up. The sun is absent, and the water washes over your face, slick and cool over closed eyes and parted lips. You could stay here forever. You've seen men brought under by a shift of the sands, watched them drown slowly with not a drop of water in sight, and now you're counting, very calmly, all the ways the rain could kill you, and when it makes quiet sounds against the pavement at your feet and crawls into your clothes to sing its song to your scars it's something like a promise, and something like comfort.
Wait. Step back.
This is not the right story.
(vi)
Here is a story about life: by the waters the two men go, doctor and detective, and there is an ending waiting for them there.
And the moonlight that night is cutting through your every heartstring, and the empty spaces at your side are gaping open, haemorrhaging shadows and regrets.
So take all that you love in him: wild hair, dark eyes, bright teeth; logic and instinct and the thrills and the scares, bloodied knuckles and burnt sleeves. The music, the silences, the explosions. The unsaid and the obvious and the implicit, the shadows and the lights. Take all of those, and hold them close. Take them, and shape them into something that will look back at you and still find you wanting.
And still this ghost here loves you so, and so when he says, voice quiet and like an echo of things long drowned and long buried, smile for me? you do.
God help you, you do.
(vii)
This is not the end, she says, and you want to believe her, really, you do.
But the problem here is that this is still a story, and it's a story about life: the woman growing paler every day and her hands now hummingbird-frail shivering quick and feverish in his.
This is not the end, she says, and she is still smiling. The doctor in him is counting down the time. The lover is elsewhere, shattering along old fracture lines, and as the moonlight filters through the curtains she is so very beautiful he could cry. John, she says, and has to pause. Her breath rattles in her chest. I am sorry, she says, and speaks no more. In the silence that shudders in shared loss and love the man closes his eyes.
Here's a story about love: there is a dead man standing by her bedside and looking at her like she's finally come home. Thank you, the ghost says, and there is nothing he can say to this. In the moonlight that waits and shimmers it would be so easy to take it all and pretend it's all a dream, a story, a fairytale gone wrong.
But you've always been too honest for your own good, and in the end, this has never (always) been about what you want. So you're not taking the easy way out, so you're not remembering all the times she's held your hand and all the nights she's curled at your side. You're not playing through all those lazy Sunday evenings when the sun's last beams would come to glide over the bedroom and illuminate her hair, her eyes, her teeth. You're not.
Alright, so there is yet another ending here, looming implacable over you. There can only be truth in the moonlight. You were already in love with a will-o-wisp and there had been someone there before you in her arms, but it had been enough. Enough patience for a hundred nights of adventure and enough fire for the coldest of ghost-chills and enough love to hold the world afloat.
Enough.
So take it all, and hold it close, just for a moment. Don't let go. It's raining outside and the light is shifting across her skin and washing all the ghosts away.
What now? is the question, and you cannot pretend you do not know the answer.
What now? Now let go.
(viii)
There's nothing to say, and you've been waiting forever. But the man that just walked in, he has eyes like the most familiar of ghosts and a walk too silent to be imagined.
This is a story about love, and this is not the end.
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