Meredith attempts to process the grief she feels around her fiance's death, but even simple memories cause pain.
Meredith stared up at the ceiling of her bedroom, wishing for sleep. Instead, her father’s words echoed in her brain. “Connor died. You may not have approved, but he was Meredith’s fiance. And now he’s dead. You don’t just get over your fiance dying.”
She likened the echos to a scratched CD, a few seconds of a track stuck on repeat until you fast forward past it, except she couldn’t. She’d spent the past six months trying to find a way past the words, “Connor died.” These two words were always with her, haunting her. She felt them in the rhythm of her heartbeat. These words kept her awake at night, no matter how much she longed for the sweet release of sleep. She counted sheep or backwards from 100. She took long, warm showers and drank steaming mugs of peppermint tea. Nothing worked.
Her wet, shoulder length brown hair dampened the pillowcase and would surely be a tangled mess by morning. She didn’t care. She absentmindedly twisted the princess cut diamond engagement ring on her left ring finger.
Her cell phone beeped. She picked it up and looked at the screen; it was a text message from Marcus. “You okay?” it read.
The evening’s events were too much for Meredith to process so she had pushed them to the back of her mind.
Never in her life had she seen her mother’s facade crumble, the usually placid face flush with consternation at Meredith’s outburst. Her father had openly defied his wife, something Meredith had never witnessed, and her heart sank at the thought of him bracing for an evening of abuse by his wife’s acerbic tongue. When she couldn’t take anymore, she had simply walked out. Marcus followed with her bags and shoes in his hands. It was still too much to think about. She could worry about it tomorrow.
“Yup,” she typed before placing the phone back on the nightstand and rolling over.
The other side of the bed mocked her; the covers still neatly pulled up and then folded under the two plump pillows Connor purchased shortly before he died. Meredith laughed aloud at the thought of Connor chasing her around the bedding section of Bed Bath and Beyond with the registry gun in one hand and a plump, down feather pillow in the other, swatting at her butt. Registering for wedding gifts was a lifetime ago.
She grabbed one of the pillows and hugged it, burying her face into the fabric of the pillowcase, inhaling deeply and hoping to catch a whiff, no matter how faint, of Connor. She couldn’t smell him anymore. When the realization struck her, Meredith cried herself to exhaustion and finally fell asleep.