Chapter VII: Fistful of Sand
Song: Fistful of Sand by the Bravery
--
Every morning I wake up and you are home
But in your eyes I see that I'm alone
You've left me with your body in my arms
But I can't feel you anymore-You are gone
--
20 July 1980
"What are you thinking about?" she suddenly asked, using any available excuse to end their silence. She had never handled those uncomfortable moments very well-usually, she managed to come up with some awful, ill-timed joke that was completely inappropriate in her desperation to put an end to the uneasiness of it all. She thanked the gods for having come up with a far more fitting disruption that time.
"Just about how much I'd like a fire whiskey about now," he admitted with a weak, tired grin.
She snorted. "Sounds like the perfect thing for this."
"Yeah… shame that we don't actually have any with us," he sighed. "What were you thinking about?"
"Nothing special," came her monosyllabic reply.
He gave a deadpanned chuckle at the response. "I didn't know such a phrase even existed in your vernacular."
"I'm a woman of many secrets and surprises," she said with a wry smile and a small shrug-glad to deviate from the real topic at hand through whichever available tactics existed.
"And one who better fess up already because her husband is getting tired of all the bullshitting," he told her in a tired face as he turned to face her, only to find her, naturally, staring everywhere but in his direction.
Damn. He really knew her far too well.
"It's not that big of a deal," she sheepishly assured him-doing nothing to ease his conscience.
"Lils-please," he begged her in that special way of his that could get her go through hell and back. It just wasn't fair that after everything he still managed to have such a hold over her.
--
I can touch your skin but you aren't there
Frustration burns in me, it's more than I can bear
I wanna take you in my fists and squeeze the life back into you
But there is nothing I can do - You are gone
And I can hold you in my hands
But you are gone, you are gone, you are gone
--
3 August 1979
You'd just come back from a trip, it was only about one in the morning when you stumbled into our bedroom. You were away for a week, but you still found a way to get pissed out of your mind on the flight that you took with Brodsky back to England. You didn't even think about the fact that I might want my James to come home to me rather than that drunken bloke who wakes me up in the middle of the night because he somehow always manages to walk into the door when trying to walk into the bedroom.
You really are a sight for sore eyes when pissed.
"Lily," you sang out as you stumbled into bed. "Love, where are you?" you asked as you poked at the sheets, searching for me.
"I'm right here James."
"Mmm… it's nice to see you again," you muttered as you slowly leaned in.
I moved to side in the last second and you fell face foreword onto the bed.
You passed out after that.
--
You've slipped away like a fistful of sand
You are gone, you are gone, you are gone
I am staring straight into your eyes
You never turn away or tell me lies
But you are with some other man while I am lying next to you
And there is nothing I can do, you are gone
--
20 July 1980
"Okay, so I enjoyed a drink here and there, what does that have to do with anything Lily? I don't really get the connotation," he divulged, cocking his head to the side as he considered what she had told him.
"I realized something that evening-after you passed out I couldn't sleep from all of your snoring, you really do have a horrible tendency to do that when you're pissed," she commented as an after thought.
"Lils, you're going off on a tangent here," he reminded her.
"0h, right," she blushed. "Well, as I sat in bed, I was thinking about us and everything that we've been through-and, surely, still had to face-and I realized something rather disconcerting."
"What?" he asked her when she trailed off, pausing after she said that-he was almost positive that she did it solely for dramatic effect. But, then again, it was possible that she was just considering whatever it was that had her so bent out of shape.
"I've never been the romantic type or anything-"
He interrupted her with a snort as he muttered something incoherent but sounded awfully similar to "that's the understatement of the year."
Arse.
"Well I realized that the sex-it just wasn't the same anymore. I mean we've had our fair share of angry sex, randy out of our minds sex, experimental sex, `just sex' sex, and etcetera. But, still, there was always that other one-"
"The one that most would call `making love'-but you hate that term," he finished for her-sparing her the trouble of having to gag as she tried to force herself to sputter the words, as she normally would.
"Yeah… well, I realized that night that we didn't do that anymore-we hadn't done that in a while. It was just… well, fucking; that was all we ever really did. And what really scared me most was that I had no idea how it had come to that point," she admitted, breaking their eye contact as she turned from him once again.
Merlin, he was starting to hate it when she did that.
"How had we come to that point? I mean despite all of our problems and all the shit that we'd gone through I could always, at the very least, count on a great shag to even just temporarily make up for all of our problems."
He sighed, running a hand through his hair in aggravation. "I didn't realize."
"Took me a while to notice it too, don't worry about it. It's surprisingly easy to remain oblivious to things like that. When they hit you it's more of a sudden epiphany than anything else," she admitted with a shrug.
"Cor, Lils, I know I've asked before, but I just can't help it-really, how did we get here? How did everything just get so fucked up?" he asked as he threw his head back, ignoring the slight pain that accompanied it when it hit the wall at full force.
"I-I don't know, I mean I keep on trying to tell myself that we just didn't fight hard enough, but that's not really it, is it?"
He sent her a quizzical look as he turned to face her. "What do you mean?"
"We got lazy-both of us, we didn't want to fight. We wanted to believe that it'd all work itself out in the end, but, in the end, that just makes it all the easier for it to slip away… I mean I know I didn't really even put up much of a fight-I didn't do anything until it was too late and by that point we were far too long gone and I just didn't have the energy to fight… not really, not as I would have liked to," she confessed.
"But who says that the chance is long gone?" he challenged her as he, slowly, pushed his hand towards her-learning from prior experience by just, timidly, fingering her pinkie with his own. He relished the contact-there was just something so reassuring and natural about it that was exactly what he needed to get up the courage to ask her that question. To fight.
She sighed, which was, admittedly, a bad sign, but-then again, she didn't retract her finger from his. She kept it there on the floor, lying by his, stiffly, but there nonetheless. "I'm tired James, I'm just so tired and broken."
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