Enough

Maisy Shaw

The dew clasped its hands over the grass-speckled dirt, solidifying, and for the first time that year, his grave froze over. Tom’s body encased in hardened earth, harder than the mahogany of his gleaming amber coffin which his family brought in the body’s absence.

‘Katie, even if he’s not truly in there,’ his mum croaked, pointing a silken glove at the giant box before us, ‘he’ll always be in here.’ She turned her hand towards me, placing a finger on my drumming heart.

All my brain could swill around was how cold he was going be. How cold and lonely and vacant it would be beneath the ground. Tears cut shimmering, jagged streaks down my flush cheeks. I imagined my tears soaking into the frost, sinking through mud and rocks, spreading my venomous, crippling guilt over Tom’s pale blue corpse.

He’d left me a note; harsh scribbles sprawling over the page, heavy underlines so vicious he’d poked holes through the fragile paper. ‘LIAR’, ‘BITCH’, ‘DEVIL’ written over and over and over. It was painfully accomplishing to know I’d turned him into this, changed him from the sweet boy I had found to the Tom shrouded in grey I’d ended him as.

It was just slight things, things that gave me the upper hand. That gave me power over him, his thoughts. A dig here about his flat hair. A comment here about his gorging appetite. Nothing that was blatantly cutting enough to cause a problem. I found nourishment in driving him to a breaking point.

Every Friday since, I see it play out again, like a film burnt into a TV screen. The note. The immediate voicemail. The frantic run to his favourite spot. His body, face down in the dirt I buried him in.

I hid everything, anything that would lead to me being the cause. I told the police he hadn’t come home, insinuated an affair. I only ever wanted power over Tom. Just like I’d wanted power over my other exes. But they saw through me, ditching me when I got too much. Tom simply couldn’t live with or without me. True love in a way.