By Philip Malazarte
“Please. Don’t leave. Not again.”
These are my final words. The last thing I say to her before she slips away, fading out of my life once more. This is how it always happens. In all the ten lives I’ve spent with her, she always leaves me first. Far to violently, and far too soon. As her broken body spills its bloody contents onto the asphalt below, I flashback. Now this is a common occurrence. When you’ve lived for as long as I have, had as many memories as I’ve had, your brain needs to cope somehow. This is my way. Think of it like - like pressing the reset button. I don’t lose any of the memories I have or the new ones I’ve made. I just have to relive some so that my brain can process the rest better. Like I said, reset button. I plunge into my mind, my memories flowing over me like an ice-cold bath. Of course, all the memories I see are memories of her. Fate’s funny like that. Screw you, Fate. Some memories are just random ones, a walk in the park, a picnic. There are others too, those too special for me to divulge.
Now, even though I have nothing against my flashbacks, they do seem to happen at very, very inconvenient times. Like this one time when a custodian found me in a bathroom stall, my eyes rolled up in the back of my head, my body twitching. I wake up to find myself on my back, my pants down at my ankles, and a very large, very hairy janitor attempting to resuscitate me, only succeeding in further drowning me in a pool of saliva.
Finally, as the memories recede, my vision clears, and I see that she’s gone. I’m just sitting on the ground, frozen, holding the cold body of the woman I love. I don’t have any tears to cry. Dry, heaving sobs escape my body, but no tears flow. Because I know that no matter what happens, we’ll see each other again. Whether it be in this life or the next. No matter what.
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