A Dark Porch

The porch is dark. It’s no surprise, really, because the sun had set a million hours ago and most people had retired to bed. There’s an occasional car that passes by on the road out front, but it’s nothing like the usual daylight traffic. She wonders where they’re going— what their own excuses for being awake are. Predictably, none of the cars stop to answer.

So, the porch is dark. She could turn the lights on, could bathe the little white rails in a fake orange glow. She could illuminate the world that exists ten feet outside of her house, and nothing else.

She doesn’t. Instead, she sits on the steps leading up to the front door. She watches the clouds move past the moon, slowly wandering around the sky like they had no place to be. She’s similar in that way, she thinks. She’s got no place to be.

She could go to sleep. She could walk inside, take two rights and be in her bed in three minutes if she stopped to change clothes. She could try. She could dream.

The clouds wander, the cars pass, and she doesn’t try.

An hour later, and she still can’t see the stars. The sky is gearing up for a storm, but not tonight. Maybe tomorrow, or the day after that, but not tonight. It doesn’t rain, and it doesn’t thunder, and the Earth does not acknowledge her.

She can hear the echo of knocking, but she knows it isn’t there. Three knocks, repeating on the wood, asking her to come outside. They ask her to talk, to let him explain, to give him the time he only wanted now, but not when she had been stuck in a hospital bed alone.

She wants to. She wants to let him back in, let him look at her and know everything she doesn’t say. She wants to pull him close and forgive him.

She wants him to hurt. She wants him to be guilty, to look at her and know that he’s the one that didn’t show up. She wants to push him away and forget his name.

She doesn’t. She doesn’t do any of it. The clouds wander. The cars pass. She sits.

Another hour. She waits. She’s tired. She should sleep— should go inside, lay down, and close her eyes. It’d be easy. Easy to get up and turn her back, easy to pretend like everything outside wasn’t real. It’d be easy to say that this house was her world, that nothing that happened outside the walls mattered.

The porch is dark. She doesn’t turn on the lights. She doesn’t want to see it— the house. It isn’t hers. It belongs to the people three miles away, lying six feet below the ground with her last name emblazoned on their tombstones.

Minutes, maybe. Or hours. The sun begins to peek over the horizon. It’s a sorry sight she makes, sitting on the footsteps, watching the light replace the dark that she’s been hiding in.

The clouds circle, the cars multiply, and she finally goes inside.

She’s halfway through breakfast— a bad excuse of avocado toast with the edges burned in the way that she hates but could never seem to fix— when she hears it. Three knocks, just like before. She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t stand up. She doesn’t try.

He knocks again, making the same promise that he had months ago, before she’d ended up back here. I won’t leave. A thump. “Aiko, I know you’re in there,” He calls, a little desperate, and her walls aren’t thick enough to shut him out like she wishes she could. “Please, open the door.”

She wants to.

She doesn’t.

“I don’t know how to fix this,” He continues, like she knows he always will. Because he hasn’t left, not yet, despite the days that have passed with only her door keeping them apart. “I can’t— you have to tell me. Tell me what to do.”

Thunder rolls, but it doesn’t rain. He stands in the shadows of the porch, where the roof would protect him. She doesn’t turn on the light, even as the sky grows darker and the clouds circle in gray. She has a dozen things to say to him— a dozen curses, a dozen promises. A dozen words that don’t leave her lips.

He leaves, his boots thumping on the wood as he goes. The rain doesn’t come to wash away his tracks. She watches him through the window, until his trail ends at her driveway and she hears the rumble of a rental car fading away.

She doesn’t finish breakfast. She couldn’t if she tried.

She doesn’t try.

Hours, or days, or minutes, her T.V drones on with a show she isn’t watching. She sits with a blanket over her legs and a book balanced on her thighs. It’s open, but she never flips the page.

A knock. Three. I’m still here. She knows he is. She moves, but she doesn’t open the door, not yet. She can’t. She can hear him outside, boots pacing.

She twists the lock, hearing it click. He stops pacing. She stops breathing. It’s the two of them again, face to face, but still a screen between them. The wind blows in her face.

“You can’t undo this,” She whispers— or it feels like one. She wants to tell him that he can, that he could manage to do something to fix it all. Maybe he could, someday, but not now. Not from her dark porch.

He stares back, unblinking, unmoving, like a statue in a park that nobody cared about visiting. “Okay,” He responds, and it stings. For both of them, she knows, because she can see it on his face and she has no doubt that he can see hers too. “Okay.”

A thin screen. That’s all it is, keeping the two of them apart. He can see her now, the scars that trace up her side. The scars that show that after it all, her heart still beats, through the pain and the burns and the hurt because he wasn’t there when she wanted him to be.

“I didn’t want to leave,” She tells him, because she hadn’t. She hadn’t been ready to be back here, to face the empty walls and forgotten memories of broken liquor bottles. “I remember it— the resistance. I fought it. I fought to stay with you. I remember.” She tried to stall, to give him time. He would show up eventually, she thought.

The hospital needed her room, and he never came.

She doesn’t need to tell him, but she does anyway. She wants him to know. She wants him to hurt. He reaches out, but his hand falls short of the screen door that keeps them further apart than a mountain. “This isn’t your home, Aiko.”

She wants to yell, to scream, to say any of the things she’s been thinking about in the weeks of his absence. She wants to hold him in her arms again, and feel the warmth of his skin tucked close to hers like they used to do.

She doesn’t. “Why’d you come?”

A pause. A moment, a hesitation. “I needed to see you. To make sure you were okay.”

She isn’t, but he knows that. It’s a fact that burns both of them. “I’m not dying anymore. And you weren’t there when I was. I didn’t forget it.” She couldn’t, if she tried. She couldn’t forget, not this. Not something that feels like the blood in her veins, cradling her heart and keeping her alive. Not him, even if she wants to.

“I know. I know, I’m sorry. I didn’t— it was selfish.” There’s something unbearably upset in his tone, and she can’t bring herself to identify what it is. She doesn’t want to know, and she doesn’t want to face the truth of him, broken and regretful, because she knows she’ll crumble.

A screen door. It keeps the bugs out. It keeps him out too, even when it isn’t locked. She wants to lie to him, because a lie is easier than the truth. She wants to be angry, because anger is easier than love. She wants to hug him, because an action is easier than forgiveness.

She wants, and she doesn’t. “I remember,” She repeats again. She remembers what it felt like, back then. The hospital bed, the empty room, the fire on her skin and the absence of him that never left. She remembers.

The porch is dark, and the sun is setting, and he holds out a hand that she doesn’t take. She doesn’t open the door.

“Just come outside,” He whispers, like it’ll make everything better. Like they could fix it all— fix each other— if they could just be, with nothing separating them. Maybe they could.

“Why can’t you come in?”

He watches. He waits. “You don’t want me to.”

Wrong. She wants to bring him in, out of the humidity and the wind. She wants him to leave the world behind, to enter the universe she keeps within the house. She wants him to stay and she doesn’t want him to leave and she knows that he would if only she could ask.

“Where would we go?” she murmurs. “If I left? Where would we go?”

He shrugs, and glances down at his hand as if to prompt her to take it. She wonders if holding it out is tiring, or if it hurts, like she wants him to. He doesn’t answer the question, and she doesn’t ask again.

“Do you want me to leave?” He asks, shaky and afraid, but he doesn’t drop his hand. He waits for her to say it, for her to refuse the offering he’s giving her. He waits for her to answer, to confirm that she can’t forgive him. That she won’t forgive him.

“Please,” She breathes, with acid in her mouth because it isn’t quite the truth. It isn’t a yes. It isn’t a no, either. For today, for tomorrow, she wants him gone. She wants him to leave until she says otherwise, but she wants him to stay for now, but she doesn’t say it. She doesn’t try. “Go, Audrey. Please.”

He watches her. His hand shakes. She sees him breaking, and she wants to catch the pieces that chip away, but she can’t put them back together. None of it brings her the satisfaction that she wants, nor the closure that she imagined.

The rain falls when he turns, but it doesn’t deter him. He walks through the downpour, and only when he’s halfway through the yard does she open the door and step outside.

From the dark of her porch, with nobody but herself to turn the lights on, she watches him leave. She watches him until he tumbles out of the driveway and disappears down the road.