𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑴𝒊𝒓𝒓𝒐𝒓

Undated. Time has stopped.

The floor was the same as it had always been.

Cool. Hard. Real. The floor didn't ask questions. The floor didn't look at you with painter's eyes and notice four types of tiredness and say I'm working on deserving her to sugar bowls at 7:40 in the morning. The floor just held you. That was the contract between Mollie and the floor: you hold me, I stop trying, we both stay horizontal.

She went to work. She came home. She lay on the floor. This was the routine she'd had before, before October, before the diner, before the tea and the booth and the silence that had weight. She was back to it now with the ease of someone returning to a language they'd been born speaking. The body remembered. The body knew how to do this: coat off, scarf on the hook, floor, ceiling, crack, boots, dark.

She talked to Charlie.

More than she had in months. More than the quick dispatches at the wall, twenty-seven days, Charlie and I named a plant and I found him. Now the conversations were long, formless, the kind she'd had in the first year after he died, when the talking was the only way to keep him in the room.

"I told him," she said. Tuesday night. Wednesday night. Thursday night. The same sentence, repeated, worn smooth. "I told him and he just sat there. He didn't say anything. He didn't come after me. You would have come after me, Charlie. You would have chased me up that hill and said something stupid and perfect and made me laugh and told me to stop being an idiot. You always knew what to do. You always knew."

Charlie didn't answer. Charlie never answered. The ceiling held the crack and the crack held the dark and the dark held Mollie and that was the whole arrangement.

April 1st passed. She was alive. She'd survived the date the way she'd survived every date: not by choosing to live but by failing to die. The contract expired and she expired with it, not literally but in every other way: the version of herself that had walked into a diner in October and met a man and learned to eat breakfast and name plants and carry paintings home against her chest, that version was gone. What was left was the original. The floor version. The before.

• • •

His calls came.

Every day. The phone would light up, his name, his number, the only name she'd added in two years, and she would look at it and not answer and the phone would ring and ring and stop and the voicemail icon would appear and she would not listen to the voicemail because listening to his voice was worse than not hearing it. Listening to his voice was the sound of the light painted warm. Listening was going back, and going back required hope, and hope was the thing she'd sworn off, the thing that had almost killed her, the thing that had taken a contract to die and turned it into a reason to live and the reason had turned out to be a half-heard sentence at 7:41 in the morning.

Except it hadn't. The sentence had been about her. I'm working on deserving her. He'd said that. On the waterfront, with the wind, with five days left, he'd corrected her and the correction had been worse than the misunderstanding because the correction meant he cared and the caring meant she'd walked away from someone who cared and walking away from someone who cared was the thing Dana had done to her and the thing she'd sworn she would never do and she had done it anyway, on a waterfront, in March, after saying the truest thing she'd ever said.

She knew all of this. She knew it lying on the floor and she knew it at work and she knew it at 3 a.m. when the knowing was sharpest. The knowing didn't help. The knowing was not the same as the doing. The knowing was the ceiling and the doing was the door and the distance between them was the distance between the floor and standing up and standing up was the thing she could not do.

☕︎

Gregory was wilting.

She'd forgotten. Not once. Not a missed day. She'd forgotten him entirely, the way you forgot things when the world contracted to the size of a floor and a ceiling and the space between them. Gregory was on the windowsill, leaning toward the light the way he always leaned, but the leaves were going yellow again, the green retreating, the aloe doing the thing aloes did when you stopped caring for them: dying slowly, without complaint, because plants didn't have the vocabulary for abandonment.

She saw him on a Thursday. Two weeks in. She'd gotten up to use the bathroom, the floor was her home but even the floor required occasional departures, and she'd passed the windowsill and seen him and stopped.

Yellow. Dry. Leaning.

She'd named him. She'd named him in this kitchen on a Thursday night after calling a man from a bathroom and being told to look at the tiles. She'd named him because naming things was how you kept them. Because caring about things that could be taken wasn't the worst thing.

She filled a glass. Poured it into the pot. The water disappeared into the dry soil immediately, the way water disappeared into things that had been thirsty for too long.

She cried.

Standing in the kitchen, holding an empty glass, looking at a plant she'd almost killed by forgetting it existed. She cried because the plant was her. The plant was what happened when someone stopped showing up. The plant was leaning toward a light that wasn't coming and going yellow in the absence and it didn't have the language to say where did you go but the yellowing said it anyway.

She cried for Gregory. She cried for herself. She cried for the booth and the tea and the warm light and the man who was probably sitting in the diner right now, right this minute, with a cold cup of tea on her side and a dog at his feet, waiting for her the way the plant was waiting... quietly, without complaint, leaning toward whatever was left of the light.

The crying was the first real thing she'd felt in weeks that wasn't numbness. The numbness was the floor. The numbness was the ceiling. The numbness was the version of survival she'd been living in since she walked away from the waterfront, not feeling, not dying, just enduring. The crying was different. The crying was alive. The crying was the body saying: you are still here. The being-here hurts. The hurting is evidence that you care. And you can't stop. You named a plant and you fell in love with someone who is working on deserving you and you can't stop.

She watered Gregory again. The right amount. Not too much.

• • •

She picked up her phone.

Seventeen missed calls. Eleven voicemails. She didn't listen. She held the phone and looked at his name and her thumb hovered over the call button the way her hand had hovered over his face in the fog, the almost, the trajectory, the space between doing and not doing where everything lived.

She put the phone down.

Picked it up.

Put it down.

The memory came without warning, the way they always did. The one she'd kept at the very bottom. Under everything. The one she never took out.

• • •

Charlie's funeral.

Cornwall. November. Rain. The kind of rain that came sideways off the sea and had opinions about umbrellas. The churchyard was small, the way everything in Cornwall was small, built for a population that had been larger once and had since contracted, and the grave was open and the coffin was in the ground and Mollie was standing at the edge looking down.

The hole was six feet. She knew this because she worked in a funeral home now, she didn't work in one then, she was twenty, she was a student, she was a girl in a black dress at her brother's grave, but she knew now and the knowing made the memory sharper. Six feet. The standard depth. Enough to keep the living from the dead and the dead from the living, which was a thing humans had decided was important and which Mollie, standing at the edge, was not sure she agreed with.

She wanted to jump in.

The thought was simple. Clear. Not dramatic, not hysterical, the opposite. The thought had the calm, clean quality of a decision that had already been made. She could step forward. One step. The edge was right there. The hole was there. Charlie was there. She could be where Charlie was. The distance between them was six feet of air and a step and she could close it.

She leaned forward. Half an inch. An inch.

A hand on her arm.

Her mother. Standing beside her in the rain with mascara running and a face that had aged ten years in a week and her hand on Mollie's arm, not pulling, not gripping, just there. A hand that said: I see what you're thinking. I know what the edge looks like when someone's measuring it. Stay.

Her mother didn't say the word. She didn't need to. The hand said it. The hand on her arm was the same weight as a teacup held with both hands, the same weight as a dog leaning against your ankle, the same weight as a painting carried home against your chest. The hand was the weight of a person saying: I am here and you are here and neither of us is going anywhere.

Mollie stayed.

She stayed because her mother's hand was on her arm. That was the whole reason. Not strength. Not will. Not the decision to live. A hand on her arm. Contact. The smallest possible bridge between a person and the edge.

• • •

She was in the flat. The phone in her hand. His name on the screen.

She thought about her mother's hand. About the edge. About the distance between the floor and standing up, which was the same distance as the distance between the grave and the living, which was the same distance as the distance between the phone and the call, which was not six feet. Which was the length of a thumb pressing a button.

She didn't call.

Not tonight. Tonight she watered the plant and held the phone and lay on the floor one more time and looked at the crack and thought: tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow.

Gregory leaned toward the window. The light wasn't there, it was night, the light wouldn't be there for hours, but he leaned anyway. Because that's what living things did. They leaned toward the light even when the light wasn't there. They leaned on faith.

☕︎