The Way We Learned to Love ✓

epilogue - liam

september 2020 : present day

Every time he started to wake up, as consciousness started to seep back into his veins, his body felt so indescribably heavy. There were weights in his skull, his lungs, his heart, his hands, his feet. Then the sudden riptide of dread would overcome him, dragging him into the depths and drowning him. He was unable to move, unable to blink, unable to breathe even if he tried to. All he could do was lay there until something snapped him out of it.

It was day eleven of feeling like this.

Moosey stirring at his side was what eventually shook him out of the paralysis. Liam slowly rolled over and half-heartedly scratched behind his ears. She would have been so happy that he finally cracked and let the dog come to the top of the bed. The other half of it was too cold, too empty without her. He tossed and turned for hours that first night and each one since but could never manage to doze off until he felt the warmth of another living being next to him. He felt childish for it – it wasn't like he was used to her waking up next to him every single day – but he kept expecting to hear her laughter in the hallway and for her to come in and curl up by his side like she loved to do in the evenings.

Now the last traces of her perfume just barely clung to his pillows, destined to be gone for good in another day or two. It broke his heart every time he smelled it and imagined that she was still there, but it was going to shatter him even more once that piece of her was gone, too.

Like ritual, Liam repeated the same thing he had done right when he woke up every other day. He knew that he was inflicting the worst kind of heartbreak onto himself over and over and over again yet felt helpless to do anything else. The only person he could fully open up to about Lily's disappearance was Lily herself.

So he reached over to grab his phone off the nightstand. He clicked on her name. It went straight to voicemail like it did every other time. He stared up at the ceiling and listened to her goofy voicemail greeting-

Hi, it's Lily, she giggled. Wanna hear a joke? Knock, knock! Who's there? Not me, so leave a message after the beep.

There was always a pang in his chest at the sound of her voice, increasingly painful with each day that passed. His heart was made of glass and every reminder of her sent a fracture along it. It cracked when he woke up and remembered that she wouldn't be next to him. It cracked when he opened his eyes and confirmed that it was true. It cracked when he smelled her perfume, when he saw her smiling face on the lock screen of his phone, when he heard her voice. It was always cracking and he was constantly falling apart.

"Hey, Lils," he whispered, afraid that he would completely dissolve into tears and waste one of his messages if he tried to speak any louder. He knew that his chances to talk to her were finite in number—her inbox would fill up at some point. "I just...I wanted to hear your voice, I guess. And tell you that I miss you."

Miss didn't come anywhere close to encapsulating the truth. Every fiber of his being was begging, pleading for her to return to him. She was a part of him. He was a part of her. Getting through the day felt like trying to survive without half of his body.

"And if this is about anything I said, I-" He broke off and swallowed a lump in his sore throat. His airways felt like they had constricted to the size of a pinhole. "We can work it out, I promise. Please just come back to me. Please."

"I can't...I can't do this on my own, Lils," he confessed, his voice trembling as he thought about how scared he was to go on without her. Moisture pooled in the corners of his eyes. "They think I did something to you and I don't even know if it's true. I need you to make it home, I need you to tell me. I need you."