Counting Sheep // Chelsey

I know it’s time for a break the moment my finger painting starts crying.

In between painful physical therapy sessions, bland meals spent alone in the cafeteria, and watching every step I take around here because the crazies seem to forget where the fucking bathroom is and especially seem to have a fond attachment to the step outside my bedroom’s door, I’ve come to a pretty solid conclusion: Edith thinks I’m dead. It’s the only possible theory that makes sense in this pandemonium that’s been my life ever since I opened my eyes. She thinks I’m dead, has spent the last two years in deep, deep, deep mourning, and is now trying to make sense of a life that involves the tragic and sudden death of her soul mate. Makes sense. Accounts for all the returned letters, all the ignored phone calls, and all the questionable looks the nurses give each other whenever I tell them about Edith. I’ll be all “The second I get outta here, Rebecca, I’m heading straight for my girl. I can’t wait to hold her pretty little hands in mine again,” and they’ll be all “Sure, Doug, honey, I’m sure you will, now keep your arm straight,” before injecting that clear liquid into my IV tube, again. But, even when the black started to crumble in around me, I still felt that confidence gripping my heart. The thought of Edith being out there and waiting for me, missing me, loving me, was always enough to keep me going.

Until the day that she showed up to the hospital, a bump in her belly and a grimace on her mouth. I can see her eyes still, colder than I remembered them and filled to the brim with guiltless tears. “I just needed you to understand why, Doug.” And I needed her to stay.

And she does. Still. In my mind. On this crappy finger painting on the sheet of paper in front of me. Despite whatever my feelings towards her are, my hands still paint Edith on their own accord, not quite catching up to my head, yet. Muscle memory, I guess. They draw Edith angelically, innocent, and pure. These eyes that stare up at me are genuine, and the tears that cloud them are almost real.

My hands drip with watery blue colors (they don’t give us brushes, just in case one of us accidentally chokes on it or purposefully shoves it down one of our eyes or whatever) and I shake my fingers from the excess until the space around me looks like a crime scene involving someone who bled blue.

I used to think Edith bled blue. My precious, lovely girl, with so much sad inside of her that sometimes I thought that if I kissed her hard enough it’d spill out of her and pour into me. I’d take that weight, too, and bear it all just for her. My girl who deserved more than to love with a trembling heart.

“I don’t think I ever loved you, Doug. At least not in the way you thought I did.”

I’m also someone who deserves to be loved with more than her heart. Her sick, revolting, black heart, who falls in love with people who are not me, while I rot away on that deathbed of a hospital cot while still dreaming of her.

“Then, the baby came, Doug, and I knew it’d just be impossible for me to explain any of this to you in a letter. You deserve better.”

And just like that, Edith isn’t my sweet, lovely girl anymore. She is empty and foul and disgusting to look at. She is dead weight who sat at the foot of my bed, who cried tears that weren’t even for me, who begged for forgiveness that she didn’t deserve - for forgiveness I won’t ever give.

“A hell of a mother you’ll make” was the first thing I said during our entire encounter. “Gonna teach that baby to cheat and abandon people, too? Or does that trait just come genetically?”

She parted her lips, like she wanted to say something just as hard back, but eventually thought better of it and just pressed her lips together. She’s silent long enough for miles and miles to grow between us, that it seemed like I could hardly hear her when she eventually settled on, “Very funny.”

And that’s it. She leaves me with nothing but broken remnants of now irrelevant memories and her last two words to me lingering in the air. Very funny.

Maybe I’d agree with her, but the thing is, she gets to walk out these doors and into the arms of her lover, and I get to stay here. She gets to have a baby and build a family, and I get to paint her eyes with my fucking fingers. This shit isn’t funny, and if she thinks it is, then I need to have whatever the fuck she’s smoking.

The finger painting crumbles in my fist, and the paints and scattered sheets of paper are pushed aside to make way for the first puzzle set I can get my hands on. Because I’ve calculated in my head, over and over and over, of how this could have ever happened, but can come to no possible solution. The life I had before this - the life I had with Edith - is shattering into different pieces of a puzzle that I’m not sure will ever be whole, again. And if I can’t solve that, maybe I can at least solve this. I just need to solve something.

As I’ve come to learn, however, Life’s got a not-so-funny way of screwing with you. Blue starts pouring from the box in my hands, and, for a second, I think I’m bleeding blue. I know I’ve got enough of it in me. But then an all too familiar head of red swerves in my direction and the pill-shaped blues start coming into focus.

Emilie Arden stares at me, the puzzle box, and the pile of pills knowingly. I roll my eyes. “Is this your idea of a joke?”

Because I really need to hear something funny right now.