Sliced Trees and Dead Words

46 - He would have been thirty-two today.

- WOLFE -

I didn't sleep a wink last night.

Reading the final words of your best friend the night before his memorial service at the insistence of the woman you love and haven't seen for a couple weeks will do that to a person.

I read it all in one sitting, wanting to get it over and done with, probably like I should have done in the first place. I thought it best so I had time to recover from that emotional hell before I had to face Luna, Grace and Darren Rivers, and all my dead best friend's workmates, acquaintances and friends who had come into town to send him off.

Have I recovered, or am I still dwelling in the scorching underground of miserable doom? I don't even know. I don't know how to articulate my exact feelings. Nothing was resolved in my mind really, except that Dalen somehow knew I would fall in love with Luna, and he doesn't seem to loathe me for it like I thought he would. In fact, he seemed to be encouraging it.

Did he just write it to ease my guilt? Perhaps. I don't know. But right now, the only real reason I care about that answer is whether or not it changed Luna's perception and stance on us. She didn't say anything yesterday about it. Didn't give me any indication about whether she could finally trust that what we have is real, not scripted by Dalen. There is every possibility those final chapters have made things worse. He was a lot more specific in articulating his assumptions about the two of us in them than the rest of it.

Luna had left me on the beach with a squeeze of my shoulder last night before I flipped the pages open, and the second I finished reading I wanted to drive straight to her house to see her, wrap my arms around her and cry on her shoulder. Ask her whether she's okay after having read all that. Ask her what this means for us.

But I didn't. I went back to Nella and Mason's house where I'd been staying the past couple weeks, answered Nella's eager questions about how it went with Luna, listened to Mason tell her to leave me be, and lay on my bed in their upstairs bedroom with their sociopathic cat, Wisp, climbing all over my face and clawing at my beard. The furry thing was a menace, but she was the closest thing I had to Medusa, so I was taking what I could get. Luna had come over the other night for dinner while I hid out upstairs, not wanting to make things weird, and I heard her asking why Wisp wasn't racing around the house trying to summon Lucifer with her manic scratching and demonic purring. At the time she had been perched across my throat, having dug herself in between my chest and beard, and I was too despondent to shove her off knowing Luna was downstairs and I wasn't out there with her.

I've been a fucking mess without Luna, partly because I miss her, and partly because I was alone for the first time since Dalen died, so was slapped with the double whammy of lonely and miserable, without Luna there to make everything hurt just a little less.

Nella and Mason have been so great. I've been well-fed, well-occupied and entertained the whole time I've stayed here. But it's not the same. We've grown close, obviously, with me being around every night and all the time I've spent working with Mason. But they're not Dalen, and they're definitely not Luna.

I got up early this morning (not that I've really been sleeping much anyway), and drove myself down to the beach where Luna and I decided a few weeks ago that we would do this, and I honestly wasn't surprised to find her already there. She was wearing her black bikini, which I could see through Dalen's holey t-shirt over the top, and her favourite pair of pink leopard print leggings. She was also deep in some obscure yoga pose that warped my brain's understanding of the fidelity of human bone structure, and I couldn't help but chuckle at Medusa licking her upside down face and trying to weave her way between Luna's contorted limbs.