Story Five | Here With Me, Here With You
Story Five | Here With Me, Here With You
In saying goodbye to her love, a woman experiences an unexpected catharsis. Inspired by "Grafton Street" by Dido.
To be quite honest with you, I was initially reluctant to share this story with you. I wrote this piece well over a decade ago, and I don’t recall it being good. I remember it being sad and clumsy.
I just reread it, and the story is sad - but not without hope, and it’s deeper than I anticipated. I had to read over bits a few times, in a good way, before the meaning opened up - and I found them satisfying. A little teaser example for you: I did not borrow the song’s title as the story’s name, as I usually do. Instead, I pulled and adapted another of Dido’s song titles. It took me a minute to figure out why, but once I did, I thought it surprisingly poignant. So the name stays, even if it throws off the pattern.
All that said, as much as I whole-heartedly recommended the last two songs, this one doesn’t hold up for me. Here’s the link so you can listen for reference.
I would love your thoughts on this one!
Here With Me, Here With You
The tinkling of the wind chimes, echoes of laughter that was no longer, just sounded cruel now.
They had come to be known by those wind chimes, the joyful couple that descended upon the shortest block of Grafton Street with a multitude of wind chimes that surrounded the house, the soft sounds lingering all down the block, introducing Lee and Jon to the neighbors long before their faces could be revealed. It was a science, determining how many sets of wind chimes were too many. How many sets conveyed that ethereal spirit they sought and how many became a cacophonous mess, grating on the nerves.
It was Lee who loved the wind chimes and Jon who was inclined to give her everything she wanted. They had fallen in love just a month before, when Lee was traveling through Jon’s home country of England. When it came time for her to board the plane, he came with her, and they rented a little house together.
The wind chimes had not been taken down in light of recent events, and now Lee stood at the living room window, her arms wrapped around her, as though she were cold. She continued watching the rain outside and envisioned a dramatic catharsis that involved her crying and whooping and falling all over herself in the rain as she tore around the house, ripping wind chimes from their hooks and slapping them into the mud where they would chime no more. She would crumble into the mud, sobbing and feeling sorry for herself.
Lee wasn’t feeling much of anything at the moment. There was a seeming haze around her, though it well could have been the humidity. It was summer once again, just a year since Lee and Jon had first hung that perfect number of wind chimes. The storm outside poured down endlessly, a solid week now of hot, wet rain.
Jon was upstairs, dying. Lee was downstairs, breathing, thinking – nothing more. Last night, the doctor had told her that it was time to goodbye. It hadn’t been. She had said goodbye to his body, and it was for naught because he had not been ready. She had tried to say goodbye once again a two days before, but it was also premature. Now she knew in her heart today was the day. She had not slept for weeks, and though her eyes were open, she no longer saw as others might.
With chiming floating her away, she heard laughter from the summer before, from the accidental block party that had begun as a simple barbeque at the neighbors’ two doors down. As the first keg began to float in its ice bath, the party spilled out into the driveway, then spread down the street. Cars were positioned to block the road, both blasting the same radio station, and neighbors from blocks away came with a little snack to share with all, and pretty soon all the entire street was salsa dancing. Jon and Lee discovered they shared the same rhythm. As they moved, that summer’s perpetual breeze danced up close to their bodies, wrapping strands of Lee’s long dark hair in the drink umbrella Jon had perched in her ponytail.
Now Lee wore galoshes instead of espadrilles and a tee and jeans instead of a summer frock. The thin, twisted fabric of the shirt clung awkwardly to her protruding collarbones. Eating was also of the past. As these dreams came to play before her eyes, standing there in that window, she sensed the presence of Jon’s family, his mother and father, and his two older brothers. They had not met before this nightmare had brought them together. Lee was conscious of the fact she was not being a good hostess, yet could not summon the urge to provide for them. She had not gone to the airport to pick them up after their long journey nor had she proffered sheets or towels or food. The men idly watched some sports game on the television in the next room, while the mother clucked about the house, finding the sheets and towels and food, answering the door to people she did not know, fretting over the fate of her youngest son and that of his beloved, the pale girl standing in shock, staring at rain and looking as though she were calculating how to drown herself in the drops.
A few of the neighbors had resorted to coming to the house to check on Lee. Jon’s fate was already known, but the pure silence that pulsated from the house flummoxed them. It must be worse than they thought. They could not help themselves but to reach out and hope to catch this woman, their neighbor, but a child really, as she fell. But she could see no one, and the mother turned them away, shaking her head and accepting their condolences. The mother saw Lee smile and it paused her, until the smile slipped back into the eerie melancholy that gripped her.
She remembered giggling. The sweet giggling when he touched the small of her back or the tip of her earlobe, running his thumb around the curve of her neck. He had caused her to giggle all through that house. In their bedroom, with the long curtains coming alive with gentle whispers of wind. In the front yard, when he kissed a drop of melted popsicle from the corner of her mouth. On the stair, playing with her skirt as she mounted before him. She remembered thinking it strange how they seemed to unconsciously move from room to room together, and how she was pleased to have a shadow in him and to be his as well.
At that word, her eyes opened once more to the grayness. Shadows hung all over her now and one would be his soon, yet it would not be enough of a shadow for her. He had been experiencing shadows of his own now for days, drifting in a coma that seemed to bring death slowly, rolling it in carefully, taking him over bit by bit. The doctor had asked why she did not sit with him. He was no longer there, he was with her now.
And then Lee felt him again. Now it was time. No doctor could say it more clearly. She turned from the window and climbed the stairs again, banishing the leering memories, peeking in on her misery. His mother saw the urgency of her movement and called the men in behind her.
How could it be explained, the passing of such a young man, in the prime of life? Lee had heard the medical explanations recounted time and time again, each one augmenting the dizzying vertigo she felt when crossing the threshold of the hospital. After weeks in that room shared with another, he had demanded their return to Grafton Street four days before. He had had one night more at home before he slipped away into his coma. Lee had been glad for this, and then she slipped away as well.
She creaked open the door to their bedroom, a door of solid dark brown, a wood she could not have named, and there he was, serene and alone, without her. She took up his hand, the doctor rising from his chair in surprise at her sudden appearance, Jon’s family filling up the room around his bed. Lee took his hand in hers and squeezed tight, just once, as she heard his breathing become shallower. The doctor pushed by her, his stethoscope uselessly confirming what she already knew. It was indeed time.
It could have been the intense grief or a variation of the hallucinations she had already been experiencing after the summer of deprivation, but Lee felt something that no one in that room would be able to corroborate. It could have been the violent flicker of that last heartbeat running through his veins or a final shudder, but Jon’s fingers tightened around Lee’s little hand, telling her more in that moment than she could have thought possible. Her tiny gasp of surprise seemed to set off a swirl of wind down from the heavens, rushing about that house and setting the wind chimes into a frenzy of movement, a kaleidoscope of sound erupting all around them, as the wind gushed back up above.
Lee’s eyes welled, as she heard the muffled sobs of his father and felt the hands of his mother around her shoulders. But it was no longer grief. Relief for him, gratitude to him. She felt a lifting, as though he himself had told her he wanted her to wake from this time of dreams and nightmares. He would not leave her in that fog but wipe it from her eyes and push her with force into the brightness and beauty of the world beyond their house on Grafton Street.
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Next Week’s Plot Twist…
If I announce it here, it has to happen, right? Your next story is a currently unfinished short film screenplay. Think Indiana Jones meets Montell Jordan. Yes, you read that right. And no, if this were to actually get made, I don’t have IP rights to mention either of them. But we’re just having fun for now. When I send, do you want some pointers on how to read a screenplay to start?
Last week’s story:
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