The Lie(8)

I’d like to say it all feels like a blur to me, the years at the bottom of the spiral, the world around me bleak, guilt and hatred sticking to me like tar. But I remember it all vividly. In horrible, exquisite detail. Maybe that’s my punishment, my shackles for my crimes.

I knew that falling in love was a crime.

I deserve all the punishment I can get.

And what’s worst of all is how on some nights, the darkest ones when I feel how alone I really am, how badly my choices have tipped the world on its axis, I think about her.

Not Miranda.

I think about her.

Natasha.

I think about the reason my judgement became skewed, the reason why I chose my own personal happiness over my family’s. I think about the first time I really fell in love. It wasn’t a stumble into comfort and complacency, like it had been with Miranda. It was cliff-jumping without a parachute, bungee jumping with no cord. I knew, I knew, the moment I laid my eyes on Natasha, that I was gone and there wasn’t a single thing to hold me in place.

You’d think that memories of love would feel just like the real thing, but these memories never feel anything like love. Love is good. Love is kind. Patient. Pure.

So they say.

Our love was a mistake from the start. A beautiful, life-rendering mistake.

Even if I did let myself remember—feel—what it was like to look into her eyes, to hear those words she once so softly whispered, it would do me no good. That love destroyed so much. It destroyed me and I let it willingly tear me apart. And then I destroyed every last good thing in my life.

Memories of love are a poison.

My therapist told me that I have to embrace it. Acknowledge that people fall in love all the time with people they aren’t supposed to, that I was swept away and lost control for once in my life, and no matter what, I can’t blame myself for Miranda and Hamish’s death. It was bad timing. It was an accident. People get divorced every day and it doesn’t end that way.

It’s just hard to believe that when none of it would have happened if I hadn’t let myself fall in love with another woman. It wouldn’t have happened had I not told Miranda that night that I wanted a divorce. They’d still be alive. And I wouldn’t be the archaic ruins of a man.

And Natasha is gone, even if the memories remain. In my deep, near suicidal grief, I told her that we had been a mistake and this was our punishment. I told her I never wanted to see her again.

It’s been four years now. She listened.

I sigh and observe my expression. I do seem haunted, as Lachlan says. My eyes seem colder, iceberg blue, the dark shadows underneath. Lachlan doesn’t know the truth though, only my therapist does. Natasha is a secret, a lie, to everyone else.

I paste on a smile that looks more like a wolf’s grin, straighten my shoulders, and walk out the door, umbrella and briefcase in hand.

My flat is on Baker Street, right across from the Sherlock Holmes Museum. In fact, when I’m particularly despondent, I spend a few hours just watching the tourists lining up to go inside. One of the reasons I picked the flat was the novelty of this. Growing up, I was a huge fan of Holmes, as well as anything Sir Arthur Conan Doyle cooked up. I’m also quite fond of the pub next door. It’s a great place to pick up women, and if they’ve just come from the museum, then you know they at least have some kind of a brain.

Not that I’ve shared more than a few drinks with these girls—I’m mainly there for the company. Then they go on their merry drunk way and I’m ever the gentleman, the man she’ll text her friends about and say “Scottish men are so well-mannered. He bought me a drink and didn’t expect anything.” Though sometimes it does end in the bedroom. The truth is, I’m not ready for dating. I’m not ready for relationships. I’m barely ready for this job.

But you are ready, I tell myself as I dodge the rain and head down into the tube, taking the passageway across to my line. This week I will set the goals for the semester; this week I’ll let the students know what to expect. This week I’ll finally start working on my book: The Tragic Clowns: Comedic Performance in Early American Cinema.

As my thoughts jumble together, I realize the train is about to close its doors. I run half-heartedly toward it, then stop dead in my tracks.

There is a woman on the train, her back to the closing doors.

I can only see her from the shoulders up.

Her hair is thick, half-wet, honey blonde, and trailing down her back.

There’s nothing about this girl that says I should recognize her. Know her.

Yet somehow I do.

Maybe not as a blonde, but I swear I do.

I walk right up to the doors as the train pulls away, staring like a madman as it roars down into the dark tunnel, willing the woman to turn her head even a little bit. But I never see her face, and then she’s gone, and I’m standing on the edge of the platform, left behind.

“Next train shouldn’t be long,” a man says from behind me, strolling past with a newspaper in his hand.

“Aye,” I say absently. I run my hand over my head, shaking sense into myself.

It wasn’t her.

How can you know someone by the back of their head?

Because you spent months memorizing every inch of her that you couldn’t touch, I think. Your eyes did what your hands and mouth and dick couldn’t.

I exhale and stroll away from the edge. The last thing I need is to start the week like this, looking for ghosts where there aren’t any.