Mad, Mad Love

You love too hard. The words resonated in her head over and over again. Youlovetoohardyoulovetoohardyoulovetoohard. They were the last memory she had of the only face she still remembered.

He had spoken those words before the accident. His blue eyes had been hard as stone and eternally sad, and the tense atmosphere had made it difficult for her to breathe. The memory was a blurry one, but she still remembered how his lips had formed the words that spelled out his somber reprimand. You love too hard. His accusation, her fatal flaw.

Perhaps that was why she was here now. She didn’t remember much of anything from before, only the oppressive pressure of the water against her lungs and her desperate struggles as the sea crashed around her. And then, silence, darkness. Nothing at all and everything at once as a lightness she had never felt before encompassed her body. Minutes, hours, an eternity later, she found herself in a white room staring down at a body from above. It was a slight woman, pale and naked with dark hair that framed her face and that provided a stark contrast against her sickly facade.

That woman didn’t move, didn’t breathe.

She was certain that woman was her.

And that woman was dead.

She had looked around the room then, feeling nothing but an apathetic detachment. There were some official-looking documents on a table, and her name was written there. Annabel Lee. She shrugged, not caring about the discovery of her forgotten identity. Little did it matter anymore. That was the name of a body that was no longer hers, of a life she had no memory of. No memory of anything but him.

Him and his words were the only real thing she remembered. She kept herself constantly by his side, watching him closely. Her love, her obsession, tethered her to him, like a moth hungering around the light of a lamp. At first he had mourned; eyes haggard and wide like those of a lost boy. He walked like a ghost around the house, as if searching for her, not knowing that she followed closely behind, never missing a step. And she was unable to leave him. He haunted her, or perhaps it was her that haunted him.

After a while, he lost that phantom look in his eyes that would heighten when he gazed at the ocean, condemning the wretched mass of water for his loss. She quietly stared at him as he religiously took to decorating the house with pictures of her, thinking that perhaps that might bring her back. And as he twisted and turned in his bed at night, thinking of her, delirious with memories and wanting, she smiled. For he loved too hard too, and he was unable to let her go, just as she was unable to leave him. Love, she knew, was his fatal flaw as well.

They loved each other with the effervescence and passion of a madman. This mad, mad love they shared, this tenacious obsession connected them beyond life, beyond death. This state she was in was but an annoying inconvenience. They accompanied each other across worlds and time, longing but never wavering. His face was more familiar to her than her own, and little did it matter that she did not remember his name. Why would she care for his name, when she knew his soul?

Time faded quickly, but their love did not. While wrinkles slowly spanned the map of his face and his hair turned whiter, her countenance remained the frozen mirage it had been on the night when she drowned. She waited patiently for his time to come, anticipating that sweet moment when they would finally be together again. For she had waited long enough, and would continue to wait, follow, observe, and obsess over him until time ended. And nothing, not even the angels in heaven nor the demons under the sea would come between them. Because they loved too hard, and too much, and that was their curse.