A number of strange things began to happen after finding the violets still alive. 

No, that was wrong. Strange things were happening since I set foot in Newport and laid eyes on that mysterious, leaf-raking boy in black. Without his gentle smiles and soft gray gaze distracting me though, I was seeing the events clearly for the first time, and really beginning to question what exactly was going on. 

It was a bit like having an unassembled puzzle; I knew I had all the pieces, at least to give me a vague idea of what he was keeping from me, but they were just a big pile of incohesive fragments I was having trouble putting together with my stumbling fingers. I didn’t know what I was assembling either, so each piece was as much of a mystery as the picture they put together. 

I began collecting the pieces though, to the point of becoming obsessive. My lists and doodles in my journal transformed to chicken-scratched notes of my own thoughts, trying to grasp onto every faint idea involving his secret. To prying eyes, my scrawled thoughts would look like the ramblings of a psychopath. 

It was unhealthy, I knew it was. I should be moving on. Getting over him. I was just a love sick girl, hanging on to the last fragments of my obsession desperately. But something turned in my stomach at the idea of not knowing what it had all meant by my birthday. Our short time together felt too deliberate to be coincidence, and he always looked at me like there was something more I wasn’t seeing, just under the layers of the reality I was stuck in.

Perhaps mildly psychotic, my devotion was at least continuing to get me out of the house in my search for clues to the mystery he left behind in his wake. After breakfast each morning, I assembled a sandwich and wrapped it up, then threw on my jacket, scarf, and gloves and set out again to circle all the areas we had inhabited together, hoping to find… Something.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. Actually, I wasn’t really looking for anything. More so, I was just hoping to remember a moment where he had perhaps allowed his guard down and let a clue slip, something I simply hadn’t caught when it happened. I was trying to relive the memories, to see if my mind’s eye recorded something that would finally string all the clues together. 

It was a poor excuse for my self-inflicted torture, but it was all I needed to justify living in the past.

***

It took me a few days to find the spot we escaped to together after my panic attack, since it was just a small alcove where I’d never been before, and I couldn’t remember the path he’d taken while leading me there. Finding it was both satisfying and disappointing. Just as the garden, it felt distinctly less full of life without his presence. 

I circled the tree I had previously sat under, then leaned back against it and took in a deep breath of the cold forest air. It was just like the day we were there together, and it reminded me of the fresh, woody smell of his jacket. He had tasted of that smell, along with the salt of the ocean and the sweetness of the blackberries. 

I told him I tried to kill myself, and that I was going to do it again. Why are you so eager to leave when you just got here? I wrote the words down in my journal as I remembered them, reading them over and over until the sentence, words, letters didn’t make sense anymore. I put a question mark next to the quote. 

***

The stables smelt of alcohol the day I visited them, and the scent made my stomach churn as it revived the traumatic aftermath of my terrible decision that night. I found the bottle of whiskey toppled over onto the floor, the last of the drink spilt out onto the old rug, swallowed up by the fabric. 

Not tonight, Violet, he said in my dream, a warm breath on my cheek before I was plunged into darkness. Just like the last morning together, his hands over my eyes to block out the burning sunrise, a warm question in my ear. Are you dead yet? 

When I had tried to kill myself the first time, I had a similar dream. Everything was bright and warm and I felt like my skin was burning, but in the pleasant, comforting way as it felt to sit out on the beach in the sun’s rays. Then there was beeping in my ear, so piercing I couldn’t ignore it, faster and faster as my heart pounded against my ribs, and it was cold and dark and my limbs ached when I tried to move. I woke to the sterile, suffocating air of a gray hospital room that time.

Maybe the beeping of the heart rate monitor brought me back the first time, so was it Jack’s voice that had woken me after unintentionally poisoning myself? It was only a dream though, wasn’t it? Neither of us could stand to see you go yet. I wrote the words down along with my thoughts, once again finding more questions than answers.