Absence

She did not come back.

Days passed. I know because the candles were replaced, the food was replaced, the sheets were changed, and none of it was done by her. Women came. Quiet women, pale, moving with that same low smooth grace, none of them looking at me, none of them speaking to me beyond the minimum. They brought soup, bread, water, clean linens. They set them down and they left. They did not feed from me. They did not touch me. They did not look at my neck.

I ate because I had been told to eat. I rested because I had been told to rest. I stayed in the room because I had been told to stay. These were the last instructions she had given me and I held them like rope in a dark place, simple things, clear things, things I could obey without thinking, because thinking was becoming dangerous.

The healing was slow. I could feel it, the stubborn knitting of myself, the body rebuilding what had been poured out, and I was grateful for it in the way you are grateful for anything that keeps you alive, which is to say I resented it. Because healing meant strength, and strength meant clarity, and clarity meant I could feel the other thing returning.

The hunger.

Not for food. For her. For the cold press of a mouth on my neck and the white hurt and the gold light and the slow drowning. It had been there all along, under the weakness, under the fever, but the weakness had buried it, and now that the weakness was fading the hunger rose up like water finding its level, and it was worse than before. Worse because I had been emptied and refilled and emptied again and the body remembers, the body learns, and mine had learned that the emptying was the closest thing to peace I would ever feel.

I lay in her bed and I wanted.

I wanted the way I had wanted in the apartment in the bad weeks, the weeks of rot and rain and the notepad with the torn paper. I wanted the way I had wanted when I sat on the kitchen floor and thought I was finished. The pull was in my blood, in the marks that were finally starting to close, and I pressed my fingers to them and felt them pulse and I wanted to tear them open and I did not because I had not been told to and that was the only thing holding me.

The rule. Stay in the room. Eat. Rest. I stayed. I ate. I rested. And between those things I paced, and I stood at the door and put my hand on the handle and did not turn it. Every night I stood there. Every night I pictured her, somewhere in this house, and my body pulled toward her like a tide, and the pull said go, find her, she will take, the gold will come, the peace will come, and my hand tightened on the handle and my forehead found the wood and I breathed and I did not turn it.

She had told me to stay. So I stayed. That was all. That was the only thing between me and the rest of the house and whatever waited in it. A word. Her word. And I held it the way I held everything she gave me, with both hands, with everything I had.