Through Glass(38)

I had chosen to cover my walls with memories. Cohen had chosen to cover his walls with his future. The future he had hoped for. In every single one of his dreams, he and I were center stage.

Paintings, sketches, crudely drawn finger paintings; one after another covered his walls. They bled into each other as they faded and swirled; one wish, one future, one into another. I looked at each one as my vision threatened to cloud over and the emotion touched my eyes, tears threatening to break free.

I saw the two of us holding hands on a pier, a broken down carnival surrounding us. The two of us lying together in a bed as we laughed. His lips against mine as we sat beneath a blackened sky with a dozen twinkling lights above our heads. My body, on the wall where he had pushed his bed up against, my eyes looking into the air in front of him, staring into the exact spot where he had lain.

I had looked at his picture every night when I had gone to sleep, as I cried in my loneliness, but Cohen, he had created me. He had brought me into his room—his heart—making it so he was never alone. I could see the places on my face on the wall that had been repainted, the paint worn away from where Cohen’s fingertips had traced so many nights.

I turned slowly as I looked at each work of art, stopping when not my eyes, but his stared back at me. While Cohen had turned his walls into a canvas, the one canvas in the room he had turned into a mirror, with both of our faces looking through the painting, through the glass. The two of us, on either side of a window pane, our hands pressed against the pane in a mirror image. The same way we had always done.

I had never seen Cohen’s true talent before, not until this very moment. Even the picture he had drawn with me in the window didn’t have this quality, this emotion in it. It didn’t have Cohen. I had seen what I now understood were crude sketches, I had watched him make outlines on my skin, on the windows. This, though, this was a masterpiece. A piece of his heart that he had plastered onto the canvas. The color was vibrant and the detail amazing. It was like looking at a photograph. A photograph of us.

“Happy birthday,” I whispered as the realization of what it all was meant for hit me.

I stared at the picture as the tears came back. They flooded my eyes and trailed down my face and fell off my chin in tiny drops of lost hope. I stared as my nose burned and the guilt I had thought I had hidden returned to skim across the surface of my heart.

No, not guilt. Anger.

My breathing picked up as I felt it and the tears intensified. A wail of pain and anger seeped through me in a torrent.

I screamed as I grabbed the canvas off the stand, my hands whipping through the air as I threw it away from me. I watched as it collided with my smiling face against the wall, the wooden frame crippling with the impact. The sound of splintering wood filled the air and my heart crumpled right along with it.

The monsters had taken him, they had killed him. I hadn’t been able to save him. As much as I had tried, as much as I had fought to save myself, as much as Cohen had fought for himself and for me, he was gone anyway.

They had attacked him, sliced him open. They had killed him. They didn’t just kill him, they hadn’t turned him to ash like all the others. They had taken him from me. They had left me alone.

The anger that had been bubbling under the surface rushed forward, blinding me. My fingers wrapped around the bed rail in my hand, my grip rough as another scream ripped from my chest and the bar swung from me.

With one swing after another I destroyed our future. I destroyed the future Cohen had wished for. The future he had hoped for. The future that he would never see, that could never happen.

I punctured our intertwined hands at a party as I ripped through his desk, sending the white tubes of paint flying through the room. I shattered his mirror. I slashed apart our date at a beach. I swung, I hit, and I destroyed everything.

Yet the anger didn’t leave.

Cohen had left me. He had been taken from me.

It was my fault he was gone. If I had been stronger. If I had killed them. If I had simply let them kill me. If I hadn’t tried to grab the water bottle.

He would be here now.

I swung the bed rail over my head, hitting the canvas over and over again. My voice ripped through my throat until I could taste blood and my chest rippled with pain.

With each swing, I ran one “what if” after another through my head, wishing they would stop coming.

Wishing I could move beyond it.

I couldn’t.

I kept swinging the metal bar until my arms couldn’t lift it anymore, my shoulders dropping with the painful fire that moved through my bones. The bar slipped from my fingers and fell down to the ground with a clatter that rang through the still air like a church bell. I stared at the canvas, the edges torn away from the wooden frame, a giant rip moving right between mine and Cohen’s faces, through the painted glass that had always been our barrier. I stared at it as the anger and guilt at what had happened ripped through me.

I had struggled and fought for two years only to come face to face with a monster anyway. Even after everything, I hadn’t given in.

From the beginning I had two options, hide or run. I had hid because Cohen had asked me. Because he promised me I wasn’t alone. Now I was and, even through all of his promises, we weren’t together.

We never would be.

I crossed to the window, wiping my hand over the mixture of red and black blood that covered my skin, covering my fingers with the mixture.