Forgetful

Letter Three; Gerard

Dear Gerard,

I can't close my eyes anymore. Even just something so human as blinking as a trial. Nightmares haunt me, All of my devastation's formed into picture shows in the own subconscious of my mind as I lie asleep. Often, when I do manage to sleep, I find myself being torn from the horrific dreams by Alicia, frantically shaking my sweaty, tense shoulders as I scream in anguish.

I don't sleep around her anymore. Her need for slumber is more precious than mine, considering she is sleeping for two. This is still something she does not yet know. I expect her to find out any day now. However, whether she will tell me or not is entirely her decision.

Alicia forced me to come to bed earlier. She came to my desk in the room she's rarely entered. We stay on separate sides of the house when she's home, because of the literal and figurative walls I have built. When she leaves for work, I do, however, leave the cavern of my darkness for the desolate abandoned kitchen, or to the restroom where I stare into my dead, hazy eyes,

Anyway, she came to my desk and watched me stare at the paper. I have never once mentioned my letter writing, nor has she asked. Perhaps she just doesn't want to know.

Alicia watched me for the longest time. Motionless, for what seemed like hours until she did something unexpected. She raised her hands and laid her palms on my shoulders.

"Come to bed," She barely whispered, her fingers cold over my rigid collarbone.

I glanced over my shoulder and looked at her hands. They were aged like that of an old woman's. They reminded me of an old woman's. They were aged, tired and arthritic. Long and bony and caverned like the deep depressions of somebody who has lost so much over the course of their life. I had to turn away to keep from falling apart.

"Mikey," She whispered, running her fingers along my collarbone. This was the first time she had said my name in months. The sound of it seemed so unfamiliar to me, for a moment, I almost believed it wasn't her.

"I'm not coming to bed," I replied weakly, my first words of the day. They were fragile, but they ached with painful certainty.

Alicia wasn't giving up. She sighed, leaning closer, pressing her breasts against my back and leaning over my shoulders so her cheek was next to mine. She sexually wanted my attention. I should have known this from the instant she entered the room. My heart raced, not because I wanted to same. The last time I had sexual intercourse with her had been over a month ago before I was diagnosed. It had been awkward. All the times before this, awkward. Never out of love. It was an action. It never meant a single thing.

"Please?" She whispered, laying her fingers across my chest, dragging her black nails into the fabric of the shirt I had not changed in days.

"No," I replied stiffly, keeping my eyes attached to the table. I knew if I turned and looked at her, I would fall apart.

There was a moment of silence, and Alicia's grip loosened. She reached behind herself for a moment and then displayed a small mirror in front on me. She switched on the lamp on my desk, and to my utmost horror, held the mirror before my face.

Gerard, I saw an evil monster staring back at me. I saw it's black ringed eyes and sunken cheeks and greasy hair. It hated itself just as much as it hated the being staring back at it. It was evil, an abomination. It needed to be destroyed because it hurt people. It was a monster.

The monster was me.

I cried out in pain. I couldn't bear it. The mirror. It was frightening me. I cried and press my hands over my face, trying to hide from it. In my fit of terror, I raised my right hand and slapped the mirror away. It fell from her hand and shattered against the floor. 

I wonder if Alicia could feel the sorrow and despair I felt at that moment. I met her dark eyes and realized how ringed they were just as mine are. They're sad eyes for a sad woman. She loves somebody who could never love her back, and my heart broke for this reason as I sat there. 

She's a beautiful woman, Gerard, I would never deny this for a second. In another life, Alicia will make a lucky man very happy, and they will grow old together and raise beautiful children. It's a shame, however, it will not be in this life because she has unknowingly wasted it on me. On a stupid man who fell in love with another man. Isn't that heartbreaking?

Maybe in that life, things are perfect, and I love her just as she loves me and we have a beautiful child who looks just like her and nothing like me. Maybe.

Possibly.

Probably not. 

Gerard, I write this now from the bed I once shared with Alicia. She's beside me, her back to me and I can hear her breath in a consistent beat of a breath then a pause. She wanted me to do it with her originally. That was her whole plan in coming into my cave, but I had foiled it when I had slapped away the mirror. I ruin a lot of things that way.

To make up for my fit of rage, I joined her in this bed which feels like I'm lying adrift in the middle of a black ocean. She just wanted my company. She was lonely. She just wanted somebody she could lie beside and pretend that things were normal. That we were a normal couple. That the loose ties I made in an attempt to hold my life together were not falling apart. That, little by little, things are getting worse, and I don't see them getting any better soon or in the future before Christmas.

Just know that things will get better after I die, Gerard. When I'm gone, Alicia will be happier. She may not realize that now, and I don't think she will for a while, maybe years, but she will be happier.

I am poison. I am a monster. I need to be destroyed.

A part of me is beginning to believe that this disease is a blessing to part the people who love me away because, eventually, I would have destroyed their happiness anyway. Perhaps, this was always meant to happen, and I shouldn't be so sad about losing my memory.

It's getting worse, Gerard.

This morning, I stood in front of my mirror in the bathroom in the dark because I can't stand my reflection. I had my contact on the top of my index finger, getting ready to put it in. I'm not sure what happened after that. I just remember leaning against the sink, my body breaking down as I cried and my contacts nowhere to be seen. I had forgotten how to put them in between the span of seconds I took them from the box and held them on my fingers. 

I'm wearing my glasses again.

I look like I did when I first began to have feelings for Frank. This is so painful. I just wish I could go without my glasses, being blind and touching my way through the last few months of my life, but I can't. I need to keep writing these letters. I need to keep doing this, or I'm afraid something bad is going to happen to me. I'm afraid I'm going to take my own life.

I have to end this here. Alicia's alarm is going to go off in three minutes. I don't want her to wake up and see that I was never asleep. That I sat here the whole time writing this letter. I'm going to pretend that I had been calmly submersed in my own dreamless sleep this whole time, 

That's a laugh.

My sleep is never calm. It's violent and painful. It's horrifying and strangling, and it's threatening to kill me. It seems like a lot of things are threatening to kill me, and the biggest threat is myself. I don't know if I can make it till Christmas, Gerard.

That steel blade looks very welcoming to the pale of my wrists.

-Mikey