BLACK PILLS IN EXILE - PART 3

Six months after leaving Antoine to his fortress of solitude, I finally returned to my city ways, very much enjoying re-connecting with my witchy coven of old girlfriends and making money from the shitty jobs I now took banal comfort from instead of resenting as I used to.

When you’ve escaped drama in your life, you’ll damn near do anything to live a boring, normal life for a while.

I'd been working at a luxury hotel as a bar manager, where I enjoyed conversing with a wide ranging roster of customers from across the globe. We had everyone from music, sports and movie stars to journalists and politicians there and my relaxed approach to customer interface appealed to most everybody I served. A few proposals of marriage had come my way also, but I declined them all on the grounds of the suitors being heavily under the influence.

And the fact they weren't Antoine.

It was typically in the early hours of the morning, after the mayhem of the shift had abated, when I would have a quiet drink at the bar before heading home. I would gaze into my wine and speculate about Antoine and whether he was still alive. I had hoped he would keep active online but I found no trace of him or any of his content. It was possible he had created a new identity for himself so he no longer had the fear of being cancelled in perpetuity. I genuinely hoped that was the case; the alternative would be too grim for me to accept. I didn’t want him dead and I certainly didn’t want his death on my conscience but I knew it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. It was a spectre that I could not deny hung over me like a hangover from a past life. Whenever my thoughts got too loud, I drowned it out with music, or drink. Or sex.

It hadn’t been at all easy running away from Antoine, but nontheless run away I did. It was a characteristic that was in my blood, one that I inherited from my renegade father before he was consigned to his long term jail sentence where he could no longer flee.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about Antoine often. I did. And just as before back in our corrugated chalet where I dreamt about being back in the city, now I dreamt of being in his arms. I dated often, hoping I could find someone to help me forget the man I’d deserted, but none of them had an iota of his charm, personality or intelligence and I could almost see him saying in his typically arrogant way, “Well, what did you expect?”

I wondered what had happened to that arrogance now? Had my departure humbled him finally? Did I cause him more pain than I ever imagined I could inflict on him? Did any of these things matter ultimately now we were separated?

It occurs to me that pride is one hell of a drug especially when you’re desperate to protect your heart at all costs. But even pride cracks over time. God knows the amount of times I stared at his number on my contact list and debated whether or not to call him, but I never did, realising my pride was a far greater force to be reckoned than I had estimated.

But there were signs I was beginning to weaken. The most notable indication of this was when I would now stop and recognise the sound of classical music playing on the radio that I'd remember Antoine playing in the background when we were together. Like musical memories, I would recall specific memories of him at the sound of certain pieces. In particular the slow movement from Brahm's 4th symphony reminded me of the time when Antoine thanked me for supporting him through his university witchhunt experience. He made me a perfect candlelit supper and as the flickering flame reflected in his eyes, I could see he was on the verge of expressing tears, which he managed to suppress admirably. Now, as I listened to the music, it was I that now cried at the poignancy of that moment shared with him and realised I would no longer dismiss these dead white men of being boring to listen to as I once did much to his dismay.

When I was at work I could keep my mind busy and my alcohol dependency in full supply.

The trouble came when I was alone. My sleep was becoming increasingly broken and my nightmares more vivid.

Waking up in the darkness one night, covered in a cold sweat I took refuge in a stranger's arms. My fear of being alone had become ever more pronounced and now I feared I had developed an addiction to needing company all the time.

The normality I had desperately wanted to return to had now become abnormal and everything around me was spinning like a drunken dance.

I was getting sick from the lack of resolution with Antoine and it was like the wound I had inflicted upon him had now inverted inside my own heart and I was the one who felt the pain even greater.

In the end I could stand it no longer.

I took a large gulp of brandy and called his number but was instantly met with a soul crushing, flat, dead tone, increasing the anxiety that something bad had happened to him.

I repeatedly tried calling, but it was clearly futile.

The number was no longer in service.

The next few weeks I couldn't escape the fear that Antoine was dead. Either way I needed to know for sure, otherwise my life would become an ever-dwindling circle of Hell.

Driving back with my friend Em to the ramshackle home I left in the far north, I felt as if I was returning to the scene of a crime.

To alleviate the tension, we played cheesy pop songs and reminisced about boyfriends from times past. But the closer we got to the destination, the heavier I felt.

The journey had seem especially arduous this time, perhaps because of the emotional baggage I had brought with me and the fear that something terrible might have happened to Antoine and I would be the first one to discover it. I was glad to have Em with me, whatever the outcome.

The old house near the woods appeared in a sorry state, all dark and empty looking. It recalled to my mind the moment in my favourite book as a child when the Pevensie siblings follow their sister Lucy to Mr Tumnus's house in The Lion, Witch & The Wardobe only to find it deserted. This had the same ominous atmosphere to it.

I knocked on the front door but there was no answer. I depressed the handle to see if it would give, but it was locked.

"You want to wait til he comes back?" Em suggested.

"Let me see if I can find a way in."

Round the back, there was a broken window frame that enabled me to pull it open toward me. With Em's help I climbed through the window into the house.

"You wanna come in?"

Em shook her head.

"I'll stay out here. Keep an eye out."

I reassured her that I wouldn't be long and went off to investigate the rest of the house.

Most of the items inside the place were exactly as I remember them around the time I left except they now were cold and damp. There was an undeniable sense that no human life had been living here for a long while now. All the utilities had been turned off and only the torchlight on my phone helped me see more clearly round the place.

The narrow wooden staircase creaked with every step I took. By the time I reach our old bedroom, my heart was in my mouth for fear of what I would find.

"Antoine?"

My call was met with the most intense silence imaginable, like that of a deserted cathedral.

The ghostly atmosphere of the house was unsettling and I suddenly felt the need to get out of there as quickly as possible.

Outside, I was relieved to see Em again.

"I don't where he is, but it's clear he hasn't been living here for a long time. The place is completely deserted."

Em gave me a consoling hug.

"What do you want to do?"

I took a 360 degree survey of the house and its surroundings and made my mind up on the spot.

"Let's go home."

We stopped at a motel that night and discussed what further lines of enquiry I could make. Antoine had family but he had told them without equiviocation when we left together to forget about him after all the stress he had inadvertently brought upon them due to the university debacle.

It occured to me that I was now in the same position he would have been when I left him that day. I wondered if he had ever found my note.

"It seems strange to leave a house with everything in it. Surely he would have sold it and moved on if he was being practical about it? To not do so suggests something may have happened to him?"

I looked to Em for a response to my hypothesis.

"Should we call the police?"

"Let me sleep on it."

By the morning I had made my mind up.

A missing person case file was recorded by the local Sherriff and his small team closest to the old house with no guarantees of success but a promise that I would be contacted if there was any developments as to the whereabouts of Antoine.

"I wouldn't get your hopes up. The signs don't bode well under the circumstances."

We left and returned to the car.

"I'll drive the first stretch," Em said, clearly aware my mind was scrambled from the uncertainty of Antoine's fate.

Before she turned the engine over, I burst into uncontrollable tears.

Em comforted me but I was inconsolable.

Something my mother told me when she'd be out of her mind with worry about my father's whereabouts came back to haunt me in my sorrow.

"It's the uncertainty that kills you."

Three months later, I walked along the same forest path my mother had guided me along to the secluded temple in the woodland retreat in Novia Scotia.

I was older now and had lost everyone and everything close to me.

Trance-like I took each step as my entire body was on auto-function. In the distance I could see the familiar silhouette of Matthieu.

Like a zombie I moved toward him. He greeted me with a humble bow and handed me my robes.

As I looked into his piercing eyes, I began to shake and cry.

I felt so overwhelmed with this reunion with a man who symbolised so much to my mother and now also to myself, that I fell to my knees, suddenly incapable of keeping my body upright.

He offered no conventional comfort of gesture but instead let me sit in my grief, knowing I wasn’t alone.

Ten days into this emergency retreat I had finally settled more comfortably with my meditation practice. It had taken me a week or so to properly reacquaint myself with the ritual and find peace with it.

As I breathed in the mild evening air through my nose and out through my mouth, I felt dissolved into a timeless place where I became both myself as a little girl, my mother as I remembered her and me here right now in the present moment.

I was lost in a controlled environment, but nonetheless, inescapably lost.

I still very much feared the reality I would have to return to once I left this place of safety, when my spiritual father Matthieu’s stoicism would not hold me together with a look or sudden clap.

As the red evening sun began to set, I could feel the fading light making everything colder around me.

Closing my eyes, I suddenly felt the extreme pain of loss as Antoine must have experienced it all that time ago when I left him without warning.

As traumatic as it was, I had never been closer to him.

And now, all I could think about was death.