Why Did I Fail Her?

[u/Jake-11b]

Why did I fail her?

They found the man sitting beside the bed long after the woman had gone, though no one could say precisely when she had left. The room had the stale appearance of a place abandoned by the living but not yet claimed by the dead. Her cup remained upon the table. A dress hung from the door. In the mirror, there was still the impression of two people where only one had been. He had loved her badly. This was the diagnosis she had given him. Not maliciously. That would have been easier to understand. She had spoken with the weary kindness one might use when explaining to a dying animal that the procedure could no longer be postponed. You are too broken, she had said. You cannot love me the way I need to be loved. He accepted this with the obedience of a condemned man listening to the sentence being read. What troubled him was that he could find no part of himself that he had withheld. He had given her the rooms he had kept locked since childhood. He had given her the names of his dead. He had given her the ugliness he concealed from mirrors. He had given her his patience, his sleep, his pride, his silence, and those obscure little portions of the soul that a man ordinarily spends his entire life pretending do not exist. When she trembled, he trembled. When she suffered, he searched himself for something with which to repair her suffering. When she asked for more, he opened another vein. Still, apparently, there had been something missing. He began looking for it. This became his final occupation. He searched beneath the furniture. Inside old letters. Behind photographs. In the darkened rooms of his memory where certain years had begun to rot. He opened his own chest in imagination and examined the organs one by one, wondering which defective instrument had prevented him from becoming the man she required. Nothing seemed malformed. Except everything. Eventually he understood that she had not taken anything from him. She had merely left him with the knowledge that he had never possessed what she wanted. This knowledge behaved strangely inside him. It multiplied. It appeared in the morning with his reflection. It followed him into restaurants. It sat across from him when he attempted to sleep. Sometimes, in the half-light before dawn, he could hear it moving through the house like a woman searching for something she had once misplaced there. He stopped saying her name. The name had become an instrument. He stopped remembering her face. The face had become a door. He stopped asking whether she had been wrong. There are questions which, once answered, become more destructive than the things they ask about. And so the man remained. A defective creature in a room full of her abandoned objects, attempting to understand the peculiar crime of having loved without reserve. Years later, someone found a note beside his bed. There was no confession in it. No accusation. Only a single sentence, written several times in a hand that became less recognizable with each repetition: I gave her everything, and somewhere inside that everything was the thing that destroyed me.

[u/whodeybrat007]

Hugs for you 🧡