Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Natily | 23/04/1980 - 19/02/1998
Nightmares and Dreamscapes

I always cry at the end of Good Will Hunting. The bit where Sean keeps telling Will that none of his abuse as a kid, was his fault?

Yeah, that bit.

And then he turned to me. Telling me that he's never seen me cry. That during February, when I should have been weeping a loss that has stayed wit for for six years, I never did. He didn't want me to bottle anything up anymore, that it was ok to cry with him, to break down and to feel the pain I never showed.

And he got me talking about the one thing I never really have done. Natily. Ok yeah, I've mentioned her, but I've never really talked about her.

About the little, completely different smiles she had for everything. The secret smile, filled with love and wanting, that was reserved just for me. The way she used to tease me, the way she used to hold me from behind while I was cooking, just to be next to me.

But it's all that little, unimportant shit that I remember the most. Everything I never paid attention to while she was here.

The little cheeky half grin she'd give me on a Sunday morning, when she stretched beneath our bed sheets. The way she used to put my glasses on my face when I was working at the computer, and couldn't be bothered going to fetch them. The way we used to go to sleep, with me spooning her, and wake up with her spooning me. The way she always made me a cup of coffee while I was in the shower, and have it waiting on my bedside table for when I got out. How she used to always remember to get some napkins when we were at the movies, so I didn't wipe the popcorn grease all over my pants.

Out of everything that we shared, those are the things I remember the clearest, and those are the things that I long for the most. All those little idiosyncrasies that only I knew, those little things that made her mine.

We talked about how I was always touching her, in one way or another. Not because I was possessive, but because I simply just wanted to feel her. How our friends always took the piss out of us for it, so we started linking pinkie fingers instead. Because to me, it didn't matter what part of her I was touching, so long as I was touching her.

I remember that she cried for two hours in my arms, when I came home with my hair cut up to my chin. I remember weeping for her loss of my hair. And it seemed stupid then, but it doesn't anymore. I remember when I kept *begging* her not to cut off her own hair, and how she smiled at me and said that she wouldn't.

And I remember saying goodbye to her at the airport, and feeling like it was the last time I was ever going to see her. I held her in my arms, biting back the tears that I already knew would come, and I kissed her with a blind, fiery passion. Because I always thought that she could get run over by a bus the next time she went out the front door, so the last memory I wanted her to have of me, was my kiss.

And I remember what I did that day her mother called me. "Natily's gone Eden." she said. And I didn't understand. "Gone? Gone where?" I replied, although a small part of me knowing what was coming. "Just gone."

I hung up the phone on her, but I didn't believe her. I walked for hours, in denial, in the rain. She hasn't gone, she'll be coming back, she didn't leave me. I went to my friends, but he wasn't there, and I sat in an almost catatonic state for a long time, waiting for him to come home. He never did.

I went to my parent's house, not even saying hello, got a glass of water and went to my room. And I stood there, in the doorway, looking down at the glass of water that I had wanted, and I thought: "She'll never drink a glass of water again." My own tears were trying to choke me.

I threw it across the room, watching in fascinated anger as it shattered against the wall, water and glass spraying out over the room, and finally, *finally*, the tears came.

They came so hard, and so fast, that I thought I'd break with their force. Huge, gut wrenching sobs that racked through my body, causing me to fall to my knees with the power of them, and the emotion that came with them all. A silent, private rainstorm, just for my sweet Natily. Each and every one of them signifying my decent into a waking nightmare, feeling as if I was wading through the lasting segments of a dream, instead of the real world.

It took me two years to wake up, and be used to the absence of her beside me. Two years before I could be with anyone else. And then I picked someone who was so fucked up, instead of waking up and feeling that pain, I held her as she cried, bottling all thoughts of Natily up.

We decided that if, after her death, I could have just talked to someone about it all: my grief, my pain, and just about her, it wouldn't be so hard for me now, to talk about it, and to let the tears fall.

And then he said: "She's always here you know. Just in the other room."

And I turned to my best friend, with a soft smile on my face that was covered in tears, was blotchy and red from the water and said to him: "Her love's like the wind. I can't see it, but I can *feel* it."

You see, I will never stop loving Nat, because I never got the chance too. She will never be anything but my perfect imperfection in my mind, that 18 year old girl who sat on my bare stomach one night, and tortured me with the sight of her own pleasure. The smiling, blonde girl who asked me not to remove my fingers from inside of her for an entire night.

But as for the saying that with death 'time heals all wounds', it doesn't. The pain doesn't go away. If anything, it gets worse. But you make the abnormal agony inside of your chest, a normal, everyday thing. It doesn't go away, nor do you forget it and get over it. You just get used to waking up with that kind of pain inside of you.

And yes: I still weep for her absence from in the bed beside me, but I also smile sometimes too. Because sometimes when I do cry, just sometimes, I can feel her gentle breath, trailing across the back of my neck.

Because I can't see her. But I can *feel* her.