Purgatory [Leland oneshot]

L e l a n d

We'll fall just like stars being hung by only string
Everything, everything, here is gone

(tw: suicide)

The fluorescent lights buzz out a gentle hum. There’s a vending machine that gives out stale coffee in a Styrofoam cup in the corner with a little post-it to note that they’re out of hot chocolate. A dull eyed woman sits behind the counter staring down at a magazine three years out of date. There’s been a few folks that shuffled in and out of the waiting room, but at half past midnight, there’ just me with my hands between my knees and eyes on the clock ticking on the far wall.

I guess I should remind myself that I’ve been lucky never having to come to the hospital for anything serious. Broke my arm when I was fourteen after trying to do a trick with my skateboard, but that’d been the only time I’d had anything worse than a fever pop up. Those good old Durrow genes, as my dad used to say just before he took another long drag off a filterless cigarette. We’re built with hard heads and hardy bodies.

I lean back into the hard plastic of my chair and stair up at the popcorn ceiling tiles. I’m counting the rectangles that line the rows when it hits me that the last time that I’d been sitting here was when Damaris had been born.

Shit.

Seems like the world’s come full circle. Or maybe just scribbled into a weird shape of whatever the hell that this was supposed to be.

What was Birdie thinking?

I take off my cap and scratch at my scalp, and I ask myself again, because there’s nothing but an echoing thought that bangs through my head, what was she thinking, what was she thinking, what was she thinking, whatwasshethinking? The clock ticks away minutes and the world spins madly on because outside the double doors of the hospital is just an empty street with ice on the pavement and road. Lives moving on and people going to work or coming home to get a decent night’s rest.

We’ve come to another end.

This time, her choice.

And I wonder what it must feel like to hate yourself so much that you don’t think you’re worth living anymore.

Why didn’t she tell me?

Was it because of all the shit we’d gone through together? I’m not the man that should have ever been taking care of Birdie, I’ll be the first to admit. I don’t fucking pick up the trash until she nags me to do it. I lost Damaris a few times in the grocery store when she was little. I went with Shauna because it was easy, and because being with Birdie was hard.

She was hard to love, angry all the time, and made me feel like no matter what I did it’d never be good enough. She’d never love me unless she needed me, and sometimes she needed me all the time.

You ever try being around someone that feels like she could shift from one mood to the next all because you’d said the wrong word? That one day you could show up five minutes late to something, or make a crude joke about her lame ass family and set off the whole fireworks brigade that she had waiting, packed away inside of her? I can’t do it, not all the time. I can’t be the man that yells back at her into this… void – the angry void. It’s like shouting into an abyss that’s just going to shoot it right back up at you and tell you how much of a fucking child you’d been.

She’d never take my advice, either. You think she let me raise Damaris when she was around? You think I didn’t love her more when we weren’t together? Probably because I never had to deal with all the shit that she would put both of us through, all the petty bouts of anger that she could spit out, especially in front of Damaris. Or that she couldn’t let me have any friends, or leave the house, because she’d be all alone. That she devoted herself to being some sort of champion of motherhood, except she sank into her own little hole, like she was too scared to make a mistake, god forbid Damaris wind up anything like her. She made Damaris just as weird as I had, whether she wanted to admit it or not.

Fuck.

We’d got here, hadn’t we? We’d started along this road toward a dark spot on the map but we’d kept going. Even after all the times we’d fallen apart, we’d found our way back to the path again. All the sore shit that had left scars we couldn’t heal, we’d gotten past it, at least, I thought we’d started to. I thought, and I guess that was stupid, so fucking stupid in fact, that we weren’t the sort of folks that had to walk away from it all for any of it to have mattered.

She was so fucking beautiful these past few months.

I put myself on that line, I’d said to Birdie, yeah, I’m a fuckwit but I want to be your fuckwit and stop with all of this bullshit. That I wanted to get underneath the blanket on the couch with her, smoke a joint, and listen to all the old records she still had. I’d tell her stories about how Arg had gotten rejected left and right to make her laugh. God, the way I’d felt when she laughed, the little laughter lines that came up around her eyes in the soft light of the living room. She gave me that sort of warmth that made it okay for it to just be us, inside a weird little house, locked away from the rest of the world.

I should’ve seen it for what it was, that she was just as broken and fucked up as ever, except this time –

I get up and walk over to put a few coins in the machine so I could get a cup of foul waiting room coffee. I hold the Styrofoam cup in my hands and put it under my nose to smell it, even as god awful as it is. But the warmth keeps me awake. Distracts me from finishing the thought.

She’d wanted to leave.

Fucking selfish bitch.

She had her own streak of it having to be her way, as though even if the whole world was going her way, something inside her told her she needed to find a way to have all of it fall apart. Birdie Hope, queen of self-sabotage.

She’d rather take a hammer and smash everything than have to face the world she’d made.

I think it frightened her to even imagine that she might have to work things out, that if things weren’t perfect, she’d blame herself for every single mistake she’d ever made. That the whole world would tell her that she should’ve believed that she was worthless from the start, so what did she have to expect but another set of failures? An empty little house on a dead end street with a man that would eventually leave her with her cat only to be found collapsed in the bathroom three weeks passed due.

I took a sip of the coffee and looked back at the clock. They’d call me in at some point, I’m sure of it, let me see the damage, tell me the truth in the way that made me sure to realize that neither of us mattered. You know, the sort of, matter-of-fact explanation that what she’d done was fixed, and that we could see ourselves out onto the cold of the street.

They’d asked me if I was her husband when I’d been filling out the forms and there’d been the eye roll – they knew who we were, even if they didn’t know us.

She’s back there somewhere. Facing down a doctor or some nurses that probably think she’s a monster, trying to take something from the world that didn’t belong to her.

They don’t know shit, though.

They don’t know how hard she’s fought to just be here.

That she’s got a whole family all over this district that hasn’t bothered to have her be a part of their lives for years. Her own mother is such a rusty cunt that I don’t think they’ve even spoken in years. That Pierre couldn’t fucking be bothered to see her after Damaris had died, like the state that Birdie was in was too embarrassing for mister mayor to even bother to be a part of. Oh, Birdie. That whole family passes her around like she’s supposed to be pitied for what she is, and not seen for who she was. They’ve spent so many years telling themselves that she was broken they haven’t bothered to see any of the good parts. It was a hell of a lot easier for them that way, to reduce her to a collection of odd stories and unfortunate events. Made them feel a better about themselves if they knew at least they weren’t Birdie Hope.

She had a right to be angry, I think.

If she thought about her life, and she thought about how hard all of it had been, she’d every reason to feel low. That sort of sadness that I wish to god I hadn’t given her. You know? I wish that there was something I could’ve said to her that would’ve put it all away, like I could light up the darkness and just push out whatever’d been shadowing her this whole time. She had to be in her own head about what happened – that they took our fucking little girl and they made a martyr out of her for some creature to stab her eye out and leave us when a broken little body to clean-up. Some gamemaker who saw her as a pawn, insignificant in favor of those that were.

Damaris had wanted to kill herself, too.

She’d said it there on television to the lunkhead who’d wanted to end all of it, just like she had.

Funny how fate brought them together. I don’t know why, but I’d at least been happy she’d found someone that could have understood her. Better than the two of us ever did.

I’d told myself that it was all the things she’d been a part of, nobody’s fault, you know? That she was sad for a long time, always brooding. We couldn’t fix her, and I don’t know if she’d ever wanted to be fixed in the first place. Almost like she was doll who’s pieces could be put back together, somehow.

There was something beautiful about her sadness, as though she saw and felt things in a way that I don’t know if I ever would.

Birdie was like that, too.

But then she’d thought that none of this was worth it, that we weren’t worth it.

And I think about how we weren’t supposed to fix her, not at all.

I was supposed to love her.

I was supposed to love Birdie,

I was supposed to love the woman on the other side of these walls.

So full that she’d known that there wasn’t some great divide sitting between the two of us –

That when she looked at me with tired eyes and didn’t speak, I could’ve said, could say, you know, I’m glad I’m here with you. Remind her that I wanted to belong just as much as she did. I think she forgot that she didn’t need to be lonely if she let herself be a part of something.

My father used to tell me that I shouldn’t go looking for validation. He told me, that's just how the world is, that where we lived, what we did, no one was going to hail either of us as heroes. Everyone is kind of a jerk at the end of the day, so why would I care what they thought?

I toss my Styrofoam cup into the trash and sat down in one of the plastic chairs again.

My father was a fucking joke.

I’d been stupid enough to believe him, thinking about how the only validation I’d ever needed was from myself. That I could feel good and not put out that sort of energy, just soak up whatever people gave me, and be happy with what I got.

But it’s selfish, and spiteful, to be selective about it.

The sort of person that tells you the rest of the world doesn’t deserve love is the person who’s going to hold you back from ever discovering yourself.

Birdie deserved to hear that she was what I wanted, more than I probably could afford to tell her. She needed to know that I was out here in the waiting room praying that she’d let me in. That she was okay. That the baby was okay.

None of it would be easy. Whatever sadness or pain had driven her here, I know it wasn’t going away just because they’d put a few stitches in her wrists and if she slept the night through.

We’d need to stop looking just at each other, or at the people around us. To look deeper into ourselves, to tell the truth, and not hold back. That maybe I’d get to a point where I didn’t have to fill a silence or shoot off when it went too far. It was going to be fucking hard, but we could do this.

I know we can do this.

I believe we can do this.