The Point Of Life.

Promise you wont dissolve

When Runa had gone, getting a lift from one of her girlfriends, I looked down to Alice and asked if there was anything I could get her and she finally looked up at me and asked:

"Do you really love me?"she asked in such a small voice that I wondered if all that crying had shrunken her insides from dehydration. I smiled at her naïve question replied softly saying:

"I love you,"whilst looking her in the eyes and smiling a smile that was almost too big for my own face to contain.

"I love you too Aaric. I have one question for you: what’s under your sleeves?"

I looked at her blankly after she asked me and then realizing that I knew a secret of hers and that it was only fair I show her mine. And so I moved my arms from around Nara and, still lying on my sides, I pulled my shirt off for her to see. I had never shown anyone except my mother and Runa what was under my sleeves, I felt too uncomfortable to even let my arms be seen. But with Alice, I felt accepted, I felt normal, I felt loved.

She looked at my arms for a long while. She traced the long, deep vertical scars on each of my arms. They had healed over time but not very well as you could see my pink flesh underneath and my main vein, which previously was destroyed. The scar went from my wrist to the up side of my elbow. I watched, scared of how she might react to them. Scared that she wouldn’t love a monster anymore. She looked at the scars for a long time before then tracing the lettering on my left arm.

When I was in hospital my dad was diagnosed with Cancer and a few days later he died. Before he died he wrote to me, having spoken to everyone else but being unable to see me on his own death bed because I was also, in a sense, dying. He wrote:

‘I will still love you when I am gone’

My last words from my late and somewhat great father weren’t even spoken, they were 9 written words in the shape of ‘I will still love you when I am gone’ and from the day my father died it became an importance of mine to never let go of it. As much as I loved my father I won’t ever have anything more than those written words and so I got them tattooed onto my skin, my mother willingly letting me as she knew it’s all I had left. All I have.

They say last words are everything, that they define a person, that they epitomize an existence in meaningless scribble labelled as ‘language’.

The last words Alice said to me that night was:

"Right now I feel very small and fragile. Perfection is fragile right? I feel like a grain of sand. Maybe if I sleep with you I will dissolve and then I’ll be okay with you thinking I’m perfect."

...

Runa drove Alice home after she had taken a nap and was rested and I sat in the backseat with Alice’s head on my lap as I twizzled her hair around my finger to watch it bounce back. I leaned closer to see her face and she had her eyes shut but I knew she wasn’t asleep, she was just supressing the urge to cry or as she put it ‘dissolve.’ I wanted more than anything to see her smile but I knew as well as she did that some feelings just don’t go away. You think they go away but really they just fade away and you forget about them until you’re ready to move on with life and then BANG there it is again.

Runa had trouble finding a parking spot close to Alice’s house so she parked one block away, and even though Alice resisted the idea I still walked her to her front door.

‘Hey Alice…?’ I stumbled across my words and I was unsure if I could get a proper sentence out of myself. She turned and forced a slight smile as she watched my lips, waiting for me to continue.

"Promise me you won’t dissolve?"

She didn’t reply and as she got out her keys from her pocket to open her front door I watched her with the anticipation that she would say at least one word. She turned to me again after she found her keys.

"I'll try." She hugged me tightly across the chest and quickly embraced me before waving at me as she disappeared into her house.