12 Things You Never Said to Me

“This room is empty.”

We did our best to fill it. The furniture was sparse, so we bought and assembled more. We painted the walls a more inviting, calming color. I polished the floors. You quilted two wall hangings and one cozy blanket. We spent a month doing this, after our exchanges dropped down to one or two sentences at the most before largely ceasing altogether.

“We are in this together.”

I thought it undeniable that we were bound by our experience. We did not go through it together. I learned a shared experience can be a lonely experience, serving only to widen the distance. You didn’t reach out, nor did I. The mystery of stringing words together in the correct sequence grew deeper with each day.

“I’ll make the coffee today.”

I didn’t mean to wake up with a hangover. You know that isn’t like me. I’m a ridiculous lightweight—two beers and I’m gone. I would never expect you to forgive me this, indulging my tears and absorbing my soggy lamentations when I finally came home that night. I hoped that your own need for coffee the next morning would drive you to make it, but even this small gift was denied. You went to a coffee shop somewhere in town. As my headache grew worse some spiteful, gross part of me refused to give in.

“I believe in ghosts.”

The evidence was all around us. Evidence that hung throughout the house like a low fog, strongest in the room we couldn’t fill. In your eyes, in mine. And then we saw a reflection in the mirror that was false—or, that I believed to be false. You said little, your thoughts locked up, far away from my reach. I should have sheeted all the mirrors. That would have at least brought forth the weight of tradition.

“We could sell.”

The logical thing to do. The reasonable thing to do. All of it—the house, the furniture, the wall hangings. People will buy anything and everything. Divesting ourselves of even one small item would have put us on a path. A clear path with solid footing. Forward motion. Action. It could have been done with a few words, when we still looked at one another.

“If the body is never found, they cannot truly be dead.”

I should have made a different choice. Time ceases to have any meaning when a body ends.

“I can’t seem to get warm.”

I would have built a roaring fire, installed a new furnace, bought blankets and jackets and wool socks. I would have moved closer, had you not turned away every time I approached you. We watched the couch collect dust as we sat in our individual chairs, our breath never showing, the thermostat displaying a steady 70 degrees when both of us knew that was only one reading of many.

“Winter is the worst time.”

You used to love it so. The snow, the early darkness, even the chill. I’m not sure when the change began, it could have been before all of this and I just didn’t notice. You recoiled when I adjusted the thermostat, the flinching nearly imperceptible beneath your oversized white sweater. I offered to make you a hot toddy. The look you gave me was so full of reproach and loathing, I wished for nothing more than a car to slide on the ice and strike me, flinging my body into a thick pine tree where it would snap and splinter before falling into the snow.

“I need help.”

The best part of me believes I would have listened. The worst part of me knows I might not have. Both parts curse my inaction.

“I can’t sleep.”

Every night you’d get out of bed after one, two hours at the most. I reached for you and felt only the sheets. An imprint of a removed physical presence. You were out in the yard, looking at the pale moon. A moon that no longer looks the same, dripping, like paint trailing down a wall in an empty room. Pale though it was, it cast enough light to surround you in a wavering radiance. The chill the damp grass produces beneath your bare feet must hurt. The sheets on your side of the bed are ice cold. Your figure is lost.

“I want to stay in the room.”

It wasn’t healthy. You created the only ghost in that room. A ghost that wouldn’t talk to you. A ghost that didn’t color between the lines.

“The next time you open your eyes, I will be gone.”

I will never forgive myself for sleeping. Yet even had I stayed awake, I would not have found you. Starblind, stumbling first into the room and then retracing your imagined path from there to the yard, my fingers reached for your flesh but found only the solidness of the walls, the sharp edge of the counter, the rough bark of the tree. Winter child, winter mother, snow-ghosts who wrap the chill around me, cold as the pale moon and distant stars I can no longer see.