The Palace Crumbles

Truth

From the minute I woke up in the house on top of the cliff, in the stiff bed with the gauze wrapped around my fresh wound, I remembered everything. I knew who I was, who you were, what we'd done. I remembered the fall, my head colliding with something solid, and then the faint mirage of being carried up the hill.

I watched you as you slept next to me, and I felt a discomfort simmering inside of me. I thought you loved me. You sank into my arms and surrendered to the ecstasy of your Becoming, but none of it was real. We had done nothing but deceive each other over the course of our relationship, but this was crossing the line. This was sharp teeth in my vulnerable throat. It was, in my mind, after everything we had already been through, unforgivable.

As a doctor, I know amnesia doesn't act anything like how it does in media. There is no scientific chance that I could forget nearly every aspect of my life, not in this particular way. It's common medical knowledge that popular depictions of amnesia are shams- but you're not a doctor. And I am an actor.

So I decided to do some more faking.

"Thank you." You wrap your arms around me, pulling me close to your chest. I want to sink into the comfort of your embrace, but I know that it's all false. It's all a ruse. This situation started because of what you did to me.

"Please drop the act, Will. You do not love me. You never did." I inch myself away from you. "You said that we wouldn't be here if you didn't love me. But we're here because you don't love me. Because you pushed me off of a cliff to get rid of me."

"Hannibal-"

"If you'd kept us on the ledge, I could have given us a brand new life. I could have flown us somewhere beautiful. We could have basked in the sun and danced in the rain. But you showed me who you were. You don't deserve any of that."

"So that's why. You were punishing me for what I did," you reply, monotone.

"You couldn't live without me, but you couldn't live with me, either. So I found a way to give you both. I turned myself into a blank slate. I wanted to show you what your life would be like without me. Without even the memory of me existing in my own mind. A sledgehammer to the foundations of the palace."

"That's not what I wanted. I wanted you."

"Then why did you push me off a cliff?"

"I pushed us off a cliff. I didn't do it with the intention of hurting only you."

"Tell me the real intention, then."

"I...I wanted both of us to die. I wanted us to die together."

I let out a heavy breath. "And you didn't consider that perhaps I didn't want to die?"

"I knew that if it meant being with me, you would die a thousand times." You stare into my eyes, and I know that you're right. I hate that. "I thought about us at the bottom of the ocean. I thought about us being down there forever, holding each other, and it...it was the happiest thought I'd ever had. We would meld into each other. And at the top of that cliff, after killing Francis, I figured that we were already on top of the world. There was no way we could go higher than we already were. I was alright with dying then, because I had finally reached my true self. I achieved my Becoming." You're crying now, too, and you squeeze my hand. "I know it makes no sense, but it did at the time."

I cannot find the right words to respond. I am almost never left speechless, and being in this state is horribly uncomfortable for me. I fumble for some words to break the tension in my brain. "You must understand how it looked to me," I finally say, "when I woke up and remembered what you had done. To me, it felt like an act of violence. It was proof that you didn't want me." I close my eyes. "So I took myself away from you. I felt that you didn't deserve my full self anymore."