Rosemary and Rue | Where Our Wills and Fates Do Contrary Run

I'm a stranger in this place I used to call my home where the air has turned stale.

The sky has now become a backdrop for cold towers and corporate skyscrapers. And the streets? The back alleys and shortcuts that I knew by heart? They don't match the map I've been carrying in my head anymore.

The trees I used to climb to catch ladybirds - the ones with hollows where I'd hidden my secrets, my thoughts, even my time capsule - were gone.

Some houses still grin at me, but they were not the faces I used to know. Windows and the doors had been swapped.

The faces on the sidewalk had somehow changed. Not unrecognizable, just… altered. Like they'd all gone under the knife - the minor, jagged shift in the eyes or the jaw - that left them looking like strangers in familiar masks.

When they spoke, it was a garbled dialect about things I didn't know. I'd given up trying to catch the words entirely. Now, I just offer a polite nod and a tight smile and keep moving.

The staring and pointing? And the whisperings? That never left. Familiar alienation.

Now, the quiet, steady routine inside our walls is the only thing keeping me tethered to this ground.

Photo by Bobby on Unsplash

But the routine soon changed. Her husband was frequently called afield for days, filling in for a colleague who often took leave because of his sickly wife. In those stretches of stillness, it was just her and the cats.

The silence began to feel like a bell in her ears when his voice was absent, and the bed felt cold and empty without his warmth at night.

There were many nights that she was unable to fall asleep, so she kept a night watch, sitting by the window until the early hours. She stared, as if she could stare his car home through the power of her sheer will.

In a minute there are many days when one waits for a lover who does not come home.

She had taken up culinary classes before getting married but now preparing food for his empty chair entirely different, perhaps even meaningless.

Her father came over for dinner almost every evening. It was a relief from the house that was too quiet with its stifling, airless kind of stillness.

Being married to a man who was always somewhere else was a colder loneliness than being single ever was. She was simply a woman left to herself.

Since his work took him away so often, her morning litany had dismantled; no longer was there a need to select his ties or lay out his clothes for the day.

She filled the void with daily walk down the weeping brook to forage for her favorite flowers, the violets.

She would fill the vases with the blooms, as if they were acoustic foams to absorb the hollow echoes before they could bounce off the walls of her empty marital home.

She returned to the brook to find the girl she'd been. It was the only place those memories still felt real against the person she'd become since everything changed.

When her father shipped her off to the opposite coast, she hadn't just lost her voice; she had lost Duroy too.

It was during one of them that she stumbled upon him. The boy her father had decreed forbidden, whose hand had rent their shared spring asunder, was standing right there before her.

It was a memory of a violent delight that had met a violent end. In his stead stood a man whose silhouette felt like a ghost. - it was both familiar and unfamiliar.

He moved with a stately stride, and those eyes - they were the same dark mirrors she remembered.

The coffee mug lingered on her lips; it was her shield to steal a glance at Duroy. She was searching for that boy from all those springs ago. He'd filled out; carrying a new, quiet confidence.

But then, she caught the flickers of the lover she used to know.

He still possessed that same angelic visage, but it now came with a voice of gravel-laced honey. As he spoke, his voice seemed to linger over one's body all at once.

As they talked, she caught a whiff of narcissus and violet on him - the same sharp, woody cologne her husband likewise wore.

There was a strange feeling to it.

The man sitting across from her was the original. In an unwanted, sudden realization, her husband back home felt like the imitation.

It wasn't that she had sought Duroy in her husband, but now, the coincidences seemed to be taunting her choice.

The days of handwritten letters - the ones that eventually stopped coming - were gone.

They were supposed to be strangers living in two different worlds but now separated by just the screen on their mobile phone.

The gravity had pulled them back into each other's orbit. It was a collision, but a quiet one.

Slow. Deliberate. Almost inevitable.

Is there anything left underneath the ashes of the buried spring?

©Britt H.

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