Lightning Bolt

CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

I THINK I LOST SOMETHING.

I LOST MY WAY

On the first year's anniversary, Matt and I walked hand in hand down to the beach walking over the wet pebbles and sand to our special spot which overlooked the two piers of Brighton.

It was late morning but nobody was around. The area was deserted, the bitter cold preventing people from leaving their warm cosy homes. The grey skies formed a blanket over our heads, a falling mist clinging to our hair.

I gripped tightly in my hand, the Happy First Birthday balloon we had just bought for Sophie and as we stood together remembering the short amount of time we had shared with her, I released it into the sky for her to catch. The only birthday present we could think of.

I watched numbly as the cold wind caught hold of it, swirling it around the airs current as it sailed off into the distance, the dense clouds finally swallowing it up.

The whole time Matt held me to him, closely, protectively. I wished I could stay in his arms forever. I felt my built up tears trying to escape but I held them back swallowing down the hard lump which was choking me.

What was the point in crying anymore?

Matt and I as a couple had changed. Our horrific experience had left us battered and torn apart. We were so different now.

We were still communicating but we talked less than ever before. The long conversations into the early morning hours had vanished. Sometimes we managed to laugh but these occasions were becoming rare. There was a friction between us, a distance that seemed to grow ever so slightly each day. A distance I didn't know how to stop.

I still loved him like I had before, maybe more so after everything we had been through. Nothing in this world could ever change that. He was the other half of me. I had come to love him more than my own life. I lived and breathed him. But I had held on to so many emotions, bottled up all my pain, anguish and torture over the past year that now I felt they were impossible for me to release and it was starting to cause a wedge between us.

He had stopped trying to ask me what I was thinking, how I was feeling or to try and talk about what had happened. Every time I would recoil from the look set deep in his eyes, the unmistakable blame that I saw lying heavy there. And the truth was I didn't know how to open up to him or anyone else.

I did try. When the demons that ate away at me became too much. But my throat would run dry, my anxiety controlling me, my body covering in a layer of sweat, fear gripping my heart. I couldn't get the words out, stuck on every syllable and now it all felt like it was too late.

Why rehash the past? It wasn't like we could change the end result.

Because of this built up tension, this mass of emotion struggling to fight free inside of me, I turned on him becoming argumentative towards him. Little things that wouldn't have bothered me before now were big issues and the sad thing was, it was visa versa.

He had little patience with me, snapping at the slightest thing. It felt as if he resented me. I knew he wanted children even more so now, not that he had said as much but I could see it in his eyes yet it was something I would never be able to give him.

We were lost, walking in the dark trying to find each other again.

Our sex life had nosedived.

The first time we made love after we had lost Sophie I broke down and cried. To be touched intimately and loved it was something I didn't deserve. I felt unattractive, useless and inadequate. I was broken. I wasn't a woman anymore; I had had the essence of one taken away from me. Matt like the gentleman he was held me to him, trying to comfort and protect me but he couldn't stop my inner demons from their torture and since then it had been maybe a handful of times.