Screen Crossed Lovers

The memory of Bear was something which X could neither hold nor let go of. It was a love unlike anything she thought possible, it radiated in every regard. It was all so much more real than she had ever known anything could be. It was proof of unprecedented concepts.

When Covid-19 closed borders, they were in different countries. X was living in a Van bouncing along forest service roads. Bear was packing up his life in the UK and going to care for his father in NZ while struggling with heart complications. Working in Show, both of them were struggling to find work and couldn’t say when they would be together again, just that they would. Then, he was hacked. She didn’t know it at the time, but so was she. She just, couldn’t reach him. She tried everything she could think of short of a PI, which she couldn’t afford. People just kept telling her to let it go. She couldn’t separate which of the messaging might have been forged.

They were in love. They were going to get married. They were going to work together and buy land and live out their days. Then he was just gone. Never to be reached again. All around a particularly difficult stay at Uncle (the) Don’s property.

Grieving the loss of him was worse, she thought, because she didn’t get to know what to grieve. She didn’t know if he was dead or if she had been jilted or if he was trying to reach me like she had been trying to reach him. She didn’t know if his heart condition had taken him, or the hackers or if he was just ghosting her. For all her efforts, it seemed she would never get so much as a clue. In this way, X grieved every possibility in a stew of the grief of uncertainty. She remembered their love well enough to believe that he would have contacted her if he could have, despite her insecurities. Yet her insecurities grew over times as she became more exposed to how crazy she could seem if she was incorrect or disbelieved.

Even approaching his memory now filled her body with anguish. The glow of him, swallowed in the swamp of complex incomplete mourning. Something in her felt that she should still be trying, but she had become so discouraged by feedback and failure that the rest of her refused. He was the happiest memory she had, and he was shrouded in the pain of the mysterious loss of him.

This is how they turn what we love into torment, like ashes in our mouths.