The Tinted Sky

Drifting

    For the next few months, I drifted, I drifted in and out of being, and I drifted in and out of flashes of Mara. I once sat on a bench in central park for half a day without noticing where the time went because I was thinking about a time Mara and I had sat on that bench. I wouldn’t have even remembered that it had been this bench if I hadn’t seen our initials. 
NS+MS
We had just gotten married, and we chose this bench to take a rest after an exhausting day of “honeymooning.” I didn’t have enough money to do anything fancier, and neither did Mara, so we walked around Manhattan with 300 hundred bucks and pretended to be tourists for the day. We started at 1, and by five we’d blown all the cash. Mara didn’t care about things like that; she wasn’t materialistic. Unless you counted food as a material. We had an amazing time that day. 
“Baby you know what we should do?” I moved a curl out of Mara’s face and shook my head no. “We should carve our names into this bench and make it our bench” she smiled wide and closed her eyes. Mara always closed her eyes when she was happy. She sat there and thought about it for a little “This bench can be the bench we come to, to think, we can take our children here, our grandchildren, and when we die everyone will know, “that was Nathan and Mara’s bench” she shrugged and opened her eyes to look at me. “Who knows maybe they’d put a plaque on it and dedicate to us” I laughed and kissed her.
“Who knows,” I whispered. No one does. Just like Mara didn’t know we would never return back to the bench even though we were married for a year after, and just like I didn’t know I’d only have Mara for another year, and we would never be able to make those memories. 
I sat there on that bench staring at the letters we had carved with the key to our little Queens apartment. As the sun went down and the cold began to bite, I slowly woke up, but not from this nightmare, the nightmare where I had to live every day without Mara. No never. I woke up from the trance I was in sitting on that bench. I stood up, and I headed back home, to a place where no one was waiting for me and where I was beginning to feel like no one ever would be waiting for me. 
Five months after the bench incident, I was working as an accountant at a bank near my apartment. After Mara had died, I couldn’t write down a word. Not only had the love of my life been taken from me, but I had been cursed with writer’s block. So I got back my old job, and I crunched numbers all day. It was easy to forget in a place like this. Easy to forget that there was anything outside of these monotone walls. Easy to forget who I was, in here I was nothing but the accountant, nameless, and I was fine with that. 
On my breaks, I’d walk home, and I sit on my couch in front of the t.v. not watching anything but the blank screen. My whole life had become a blank screen. Mara’s mother still called now and then to check on me. She would whisper on the phone to me as if she was afraid that if she spoke any louder, her voice would shatter me like a wine glass in the hand of an opera singer. 
“How are you mijo?” she’d whisper, and I’d mutter that I was fine into the phone, just loud enough so she could hear. “It’s okay if you’re not nino, don’t lie to me” I sighed into the phone, and I muttered that no really I was fine. She’d try to get me to say anything else. Eventually, she’d give up. Amayah would come over on Tuesdays after work and clean the apartment for me. Then cook a couple of meals (that she’d bring the groceries for), so I’d last through the week.
“She wouldn’t want you to live like this” Amayah said once after cleaning the kitchen. I turned around to face her. 
“We’ll never know exactly how she wanted me to live, she’s dead Amayah” and I turned back to my blank T.V. screen, and through the black reflection. I could see Amayah’s face stretch in pain. She left after that and didn’t come back the next Tuesday. One day I walked into the apartment after work, and there she was cooking chicken parm.
“I hate chicken parm,” I told her, and I walked into my bedroom without saying another word.