TMoL one shot - A Visit to Lolita.

A Visit to Lolita.

They say that people change over time. They say that when push comes to shove people can do the unexpected. I always thought that the change they were talking about would be groundbreaking: that all of a sudden someone would wake up a completely different person than they had been before.

I was wrong. Change isn't groundbreaking; change is gradual. Change the gentle ebb and flow of the tide along the shoreline, tweaking and perfecting our true character as our body responds to pain, to loss. We forget that as we are changing and growing, so are the people around us; I didn't notice how much the people in my life had changed until it was too late.

Lolita...

My Lolita, a painting in black and brown, eyes the colour of black coffee and skin the colour of earth. She had hair the colour of midnight, but it resembled a river as it rolled and tumbled and twisted and turned - cascading down her back in waves. Like a river - in more ways than one - she would flow along banks and through towns, collecting other people's debris as she went, fixing them. I was frozen - harsh and unforgiving - but she changed that. She turned my cold ice to running water - and I fell for her like rain falls to the ground. Now my river overflows, and I find myself drowning in our memories, wanting - needing - to be closer to her.

Lolita spoke each word with such passion, such conviction; it was impossible not to look at her - not to commit her touch and smile and taste and laugh and everything about her to memory.

Lolita...

My Lolita, a painting in black and brown - stolen from me.

Lana, standing. Guns. Robin, screaming, crying for help. Gunshots.

Lolita, my Lolita. On the ground, clutching her stomach.

Shot. Dead. Stolen from me.

***

The atmosphere was melancholic - I felt weighed down with emotion and pensive sadness as I approached it. I watched as a flight of birded silhouettes closed in on the parchment of the sky, spreading like dark ink. The air was thick. I couldn't be here, not now. It was too soon.

I held the flowers between my fingertips, my scuffed palms brushing the thin wrapping around them. I looked straight at it then, the gravestone.

In loving memory of Lolita Abri,
1988-2017
'Who carried the weight of the world on her shoulders, but laughed like she didn't have a worry at all'

God, I missed her.

My throat was tight as I stood on the patch of grass in front of her gravestone. The grass, once green and thriving, was now dead, broken, defeated - not much different to me. I breathed slowly, no longer able to hold in the tears that my eyes so often harbour. I thought I cried her name, but all that escaped my lips was merely a whisper. Not the way she used to whisper to me, though, this sound was ugly: tainted with pain.

I fell to my knees and furiously wiped away the tears from my cool skin. I clung to the gravestone tightly, in desperation, but it was cold and hard and inanimate: everything she wasn't. Lolita was a rainbow after a storm, the sliver lining to a cloud, the only star in the constellation that believed in me. Believed in us.

Lolita...

She was so soft, so gentle, so unreachable. So unreachable, but I got to hold her.

'I am lost without you, Lolita.' My breaths came quickly, unevenly - I was consumed with emotion.

'Without you, I am nothing. Cass has gone back to university now, the flat is empty - lacking personality. Dad is trying to convince us he's fine, but I know he's not. He's picked up the drinking again - I saw him chugging a pint of larger in the bathroom last night. He's not going to his AA meetings anymore, he's down the pub instead.'