The Venus Fix

Eighty-Three

Dearest,

Happy birthday.

Ironic isn’t it? To even use the word happy? But truly, soon we will be happy because we’ll be together and then we’ll know some form of happiness, or if not that, then relief-maybe peace, at least peace.

Soon all just punishments will have been meted out and everyone will have been held accountable for the damage that they have done. There isn’t anything left that matters to me but this: that you, my sweetest heart, have been avenged.

I can close my eyes and I can see us, not at the end, not when I lost you, but before that.

There was one day at the beach, four, maybe five summers ago. It was hot and you were lying in the sun, soaking it up, and I was swimming, and when I got out of the water I stood over you and flicked drops of cold water on your legs and your stomach and your arms, and you laughed.

In my mind, in this memory, you are squinting in the bright sunlight, and you put your hand up to shield your eyes, and the drops of seawater flying through the air catch the light and shine like broken crystals as they fall onto your skin. Liquid light like your laugh.

I knelt down beside you and leaned over and kissed you, and you laughed again, telling me that my hair was tickling you, but you raised your arms and wrapped them around me, anyway.

It has been my punishment that I cannot remember every time I held you or you reached for me and there must have been thousands. How could I forget any of them? And damn to hell the people who made it so I would have to try to remember them at all. Just damn them to hell.

The bitch witches who thrust and wink and whisper and suck the men deeper, deeper, deeper. They fly through the black ether and weave through the Web, weaving their own web, black night twisted women. I’m helping them get to hell this way. I tried other ways for years and I didn’t get anywhere, but then I had something to lose. You. Now that you are lost to me, it doesn’t matter anymore.

No, it matters. The truth is it will be a relief to finish and to stop missing you. To give in to the hole in my chest that hurts as badly as if it had been made with a scalpel instead of your absence. Sliced right through, cut open, dripping everything that I tried to do, every bit of good I tried to accomplish, every change I tried to expedite. All discredited, all a giant cosmic joke.

You wrote that it wasn’t you I loved, but some idea of you. How could you ever think that? I would kill to show how much I loved you.

Now I have to shower and dress and then pick up your birthday cake, the one you loved the best. A yellow cake with strawberries and whipped cream. Not with one candle for each year, but with only one candle for the year that I have lived without you.

This I do for you.