Joy Was Gone
by Jeff Thompson
She went away when Charlie was born. Maybe she went back into herself, becoming someone else, for a time at least. The soft humming that so often had accompanied her morning tea, the way her mouth quirked into the faint breath of a smile. The way she wrapped the gray threadbare blanket she loved so much around her shoulders and leaned against the edge of a doorway, watching the sun slowly climb to steal another day from us…all of it was gone with Charlie. And I don’t blame Charlie. I would never do that. But there are times, fleeting and private, that I miss who she was. I wonder who she might have been. But when Charlie was born, all that ended. She no longer looked out the window, gazing at everything and nothing all at once. She was just gone.
There was venom on her lips and whatever love we might have once held was now passed down into the deepest of wells, one that held no bottom nor promise of a return. The echo of loneliness raced between us with each breath and the silence stretched like mountains dividing the continent. Charlie was happy, but Joy was gone. I reached for her, looking in all the moments we had once shared, all the times we had once built. Each loving brick we had placed with infinite care and subtle precision, all crumbling. Those houses of memory had been pillaged, burned to the ground and the things they held, the hours we had spent, all of them were ash and dust. Joy was gone, and with her- so too was her namesake.
This morbidity that slowly poisoned our love and our time with each other. This will not last. It was the lie we had told ourselves, foolishly thinking it could be true. But it was the most vile and bloody of lies, a lie told with the intent of soothing the razor’s end that we knew was coming. Charlie was here now, and Joy was not.
I had hoped for a different ending, I hoped we could have our happily ever after. Sitting here in my car, watching her bounce Charlie on her hip as she waved goodbye to her husband leaving for work, I knew that what we had would never be the same again, and so today I would finally go to her door and introduce myself for the first time, and of course, for the last time. I didn’t want to kill her. I didn’t want to kill any of them. The news of course called me a serial killer, but they didn’t understand the connection Joy and I shared. It was wordless and without traditional connection, but we were connected just the same.
In the end, this Joy- like the others, would go away, but I would find her again. There is always more joy to be found, if only we know where to look.
Jeff has been published in the Bangalore Review, Write Landing, and has self-published two previous books on Amazon with a third on the way. He spends every spare moment reading or writing and attributes any success to his loving friends and family.