darlingi

[darlingi]

Darling, I

A journal entry written by an unknown source, as a letter to,

MARGARET DARLENE LAURON

MARCH 1, 1975—DECEMBER 23, 2011

“Did you know her?” A man brushes my shoulder as he comes up right beside me. I don’t even nod, let alone had noticed the press of it.

What business does he have to stand before you? He wasn’t Mr. Van Dupont… in fact his appearance was the exact opposite. He looked tidy— his hair gelled down to the side as he lowered his posh hat to rest against his chest, over his dark grey tie that was tucked under his long trenchcoat. Well, now that I’ve noticed all of him… he was lacking in color, more especially in his skin. It was just a little breezy, but February passed just yesterday and it was getting bright out.

“Sir?” He turned to me, and it was then I also noticed he had his eyes covered with blacked-out shades. It was even more of a surprise that he was acknowledging me. “Could you give me just this moment?”

What? Why? What made this man worthy of your presence and I not? Did he know how I held you in my arms at your last breath— how it was those same arms that let you slip from them and fall?

Did he know that your laugh can cure the melancholy of a thousand wounded soldiers, that your thoughts could entertain the weathered sky, that your hands could burn prints into my skin?

But as I stepped back, and watched from the closest and most respectful distance, sitting by a near bench on the other side of the gravel path. As the man in the grey trenchcoat knelt to your stone and murmured, I had picked up the words that he said,

“Margaret, I… I can’t believe the nerve of you. I can’t believe you are down here, and this is how we meet again after I had seen you last running out the door. Do you remember when we were both young, and it would take a millennia chasing you and little Lou around the manor at a round of hide ‘n seek? You always knew how to be reached just at my fingertips. And that’s what made me so angry when you would not open up to me as we grew, and when Mother—”

He pauses, and he is vulnerable. Before he speaks again gravelly, “When Ma and Pa had passed and you were just harder to control. Margaret, I… I’m so angry at you for pursuing that ridiculous science project of yours, and you and Louis going through knacks of trouble for it, and how you were always so irritated by my interference. Well, I was oh so irritated by your attitude! And this rebellious nature that influenced you. Why, why couldn’t you just stay still!

“And now I am here, and you are there! And for the past month it was me planning the flowers they arranged by your bed— golden marguerites, because I knew that much of you had never changed— and I played Stevie at the program, I looked through all your albums to find that song you used to hum. Damnit, Peggy, I miss you so much…!”

There was a tense in his back that formed as he hunched himself over, and I listened in for any sign of more words. But there wasn’t. Instead he had drew in a long breath and stood up, his head hung low as he spun around. His hair was tousled by the many times he had brushed it up as he spoke to you, and his tie was loosened around his collar that he opened to keep his throat from choking up.

I watch him privately tidy himself up again, lifting his shades to dab his tears with his gloves, patting down his head, before bowing it down to sit his hat atop of it again. Then he had left, without another word or sniffle.

If there was one man that had held more guilt of your ending than I did, a man that missed you more than that Louis van Dupont did, it was your own older brother. Darling, I wish you could have introduced me to him. ‘Twas not a topic you ever liked to indulge in, and I understand of it now. But maybe, if we met, and I had visited your manor, I would have known of your favorite flowers, or of the Stevie that he mentioned. I wish I knew you more than what I knew you did for me. I will get you back, my Darling.