Verdigris

The salt air has a way of eating things whole.

First, it claims the iron railings of the balcony, flaking them into red rust that stains the white stone beneath. Then, it bleeds into the velvet damask of the parlor, stiffening the fabric until it smells permanently of rot and low tide.

Finally, it goes for the mind. It devours the memory of his voice. I hear him everywhere, yet I can no longer pinpoint the exact timbre of his laugh. Sometimes the echo is loud enough that I find myself reaching for the empty air beside me or craning my neck, expecting him to walk into the room, shaking the rain from his oilskins. I know he’ll never turn the corner or walk through the front door again, but the body is a stubborn machine. I can’t help but look.

Which is why my feet follow a familiar wind-scoured path to where the earth gives way to the beckoning froth of the sea. Always at twilight, just before the sun winks below the horizon. Watching the waves lose their glow brings me comfort. There’s a perverse sense of hope in knowing they’ll be brought back to life by morning; that not everything has to remain cold and inert.

I tell myself I watch the waves for enjoyment. Or to observe the gulls’ migration. It never matters which excuse I pick for the day because when I extend the three-draw telescope, the ritual is always the same. I pass it between my hands. Fidgeting. I don’t know why my nerves still best me after so many years. The horizon never changes.

But I do— I have.

Even the telescope leaves green rings of verdigris on the palms of my kidskin gloves. He bought them for me on our third trip to the Alps, at a little shop with boxes of flowers beneath the windows. My hair hadn’t yet started to gray, and I still believed anything—within reason—waited for me just beyond the horizon of possibility.

How foolish that woman had been. How rich she was in time, and how carelessly she spent it.

Through the telescope, I spy on the world below. After our wedding, we moved into an isolated manor on the bluffs above a village, wanting nothing but the sea and each other. For a time, I’d been friendly with the villagers and fishermen and crabbers. They liked my big-city disposition, and I liked their slower way of life.

Now, I have to beg for a moment of ordinary human connection. They look away or offer pitiful smiles, as if my grief is a stain running down the hill. Our manor has been reduced to a leviathan of grief haunted by generations of ghosts. None of which are him.

So, when the villagers below, with their families and laughter-filled homes, ask me how I am, a madness takes root in my throat. How are they unable to tell that a storm stronger than any northeaster churns beneath my ribs? How dare they exist so casually while my world has stopped?

Sometimes I scream into the expanse of my home. I march into the parlor and smash my fists against the keys of the grand piano until the strings’ discordant shriek shakes the rafters. Not even born from rage; the halls are too still. I want to feel the living room filled with heat from the hearth as he reads his books, a half-empty glass of port in hand. I want him to catch me by the waist and spin me across the Persian rug like he used to, until my hair tumbles free from its pins and my lungs burn from the velocity of being young and loved. We were so beautifully loud then.

I am reduced to a curator of dead days.

A small solace exists at the summit of the bluffs, where some of the suffocating quiet eases with the roaring winds. My cheeks sting with its caress, but it is better than feeling nothing. When I reach the top, I plant my feet in the tall, dying grass. Legs apart, shoulders back, let the wind move through you, as he taught me.

I lift the brass tube, pressing the cold metal rim to my eyebrow until my vision narrows to the singular aperture of the telescope, and for a fleeting second, it’s like looking through his eyes.

The sea holds a particular melancholia tonight. Its waves roll over one another like shrouds of silk thrown over a moving grave. I sweep the lens in my usual pattern.

North to east. East to south. South to west.

West to north gives me a terrible crick in my neck, a reminder that my body seems to erode with each passing season. My joints pop; my spine aches. I often wonder whether his body has eroded among the sharp basalt cliffs or whether he found a peaceful tomb among the sea creatures. I close my eyes and retreat into my own tomb of cavernous emptiness. If I stand still enough, if I hold my breath until my chest burns, I can feel the scratch of his wool coat against my skin, smell his aftershave borne on the wind.

When someone has been absent for so long, how does the brain retain every bit of them? Why are the torturous details preserved while the macro slips away?

Think harder.

I summon the dimple on his chin when he concentrated on a difficult ledger. The singular fleck of amber-yellow in the swirling brown iris of his left eye. The way his quiet protectiveness shielded me from the world. Yet, I let the dust accumulate in his study. I haven't moved his half-inked fountain pen, nor the logbook that ends mid-sentence on a Tuesday seven years ago. But in my mind, he will never be a relic. He can’t be. Every bit of joy in my past existence has known nothing else but him.

A sudden shift in the air pressure raises the hair on my arms. He accustomed me to the temperament of nature.

From the north, a bank of sea-fog rolls in, swallowing the distant headlands one by one until the sea is indistinguishable from the sky. I lower the telescope. There is nothing left to see. In this absolute, blinding white, the external world ceases to exist. There are no cliffs, no village, no distant ships, no sky. There is only the square inch of earth beneath my boots, and the terrifying, infinite space inside my own head.

I swallow, and the sound is shockingly loud in the muffled dampness. I stand frozen, holding the telescope against my ribs like a rib itself. The fog presses against my eyelids. It feels like wet silk, heavy and cold, mimicking the weight of a hand resting on my brow when the fever took me nine winters ago. His hand.

I find myself leaning forward into the empty air, tilting my face upward just an inch. My lips part. The air tastes of salt and minerals, the exact taste of his skin after he had been out on the deck for hours, checking the rigging. My mind, desperate and starving, seizes upon it.

"Please," I whisper. It is the first time I have spoken aloud on these bluffs in years.

I don’t move. I dare not move. To take a step forward might bring me over the edge of the cliff, but to take a step back would be an admission that I am entirely alone. And so, I choose agonizing purgatory.

The rhythm of my breathing doubles. Is it the echo of the waves far below? Or the phantasmic cadence of a second pair of lungs?

My eyes close as need hollows me out completely. I imagine a shallow spoon scraping away the last vestiges of my reason until I am nothing but a vessel for his absence. If the wind were to blow stronger, it would whistle through me as it does through the ruins of the old abbey down the coast.

I reach out a hand. My glove, stained with the green rust of the past, cuts through the fog. My fingers curl, grasping at nothing.

There is only the cold. There is only the damp.

I draw my hand back and press it against my chest, feeling the frantic, stubborn thudding of my heart. In every minute of my desire, he is there. I lift the telescope once more, with a fleeting prayer, that his silhouette will dance along the lighthouse’s rays.