The newspaper headline is a hand around my heart, gripping tighter with each ragged beat: squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.
Those simple words, so impersonal, reducing Jess to nothing more than a profession and a too-low number. Those words don’t say anything meaningful or real, and I want to scream:
What about the way she could smile and make even the cynics fall in love? Or how her voice could silence the loudest crowd with only a few notes?
What about the little things that say so much about a person? How Jess liked to visit the beach and feel the sand between her bare toes. That if she heard birdsong in the morning she always thought it would be a good day.
And what about me, the nameless lover, wandering aimlessly round the hollow shell of our home? If only the writer of this unfeeling piece could sense, for just a second, how Jess turned my body to clay, moulding it into all we could ever need, whenever her lips brushed mine. Even when the drugs had worn away her muscles, making her weightless in my arms, I still felt safe when she was close, protected by the ghost of our dreams.
Inside the paper, details are laid out for careless mouths to chew on over breakfast. She was discovered in a nightclub restroom, alone and slumped on the floor. Her sleeve was rolled back, needle by her side. There was vomit in her hair and on her chin, and she must’ve hit her head on the basin, they say, because her forehead was grazed with blood.
There’s no mention of her brave fight or beautiful music; of those cold-turkey mornings, when sweat stained her brow and teeth clamped tongue to stop from screaming. Or how, on good days, the light returned to her eyes, shining so brightly she could set this callous earth on fire.
They focus only on the facts of her death—cold, dirty facts that crawl, like ants, upon my skin, reminding me only of a momentary relapse that cost Jess her life. But what about the truth?
For all her flaws, Jess was my world. When she left, that world went black.
Anna Sanderson is a writer from Nottingham, England, who writes about the world as she sees it (with the odd twist and turn). Her work can be found online at sites such as 101 Words, A Quiet Courage and Fifty Word Stories, and in various printed publications including Maelstrom, Razur Cuts and Lights Go Out. You can follow her story on Twitter at @annasanderson86.