In the letter you tried to tell her. There were no excuses for why you couldn’t do it for her or the kids. Just explanations. They say the truth sets you free, but that’s bullshit, the truth’s a prison. You’ve told her the truth and you know it will lock her away.
The funny thing, the thing you never expected, is that everything is dull except for Alice. It’s the one thing that seeps through, a kind of punishment, a repentance for all of it. Nearly twenty years of it. You should be buried under the weight of it and sometimes you think you are but you still breathe when you wake up in the morning, rolling over and looking at the bedside table, looking for the taste, knowing it’s not there, then there’s the fits and sparks of energy through the mental aerobics of needing it, knowing it’s not there and finally convincing yourself you can actually keep going without it.
And that’s when Alice seeps in. Alice being locked away forever is even worse than knowing there’s no taste waiting for you. You can smell her, somewhere in the membranes of your respiratory system is a piece of her, stuck there, a piece of her forever in you. You curl up and make yourself smaller than you already are and focus on feeling Alice in your nose, imagining it’s all of her, buried in you waiting for you to say the magic words like she’s a genie in a bottle, ready to materialise next to you. You cradle her there, her memory, her smell and you catalogue all the things you did together. You start from the first time you saw her, jumping around at a gig, covered in sweat, hair matted and making her head look too big for her body. You offered to take her backstage to meet the band. She said no, but she talked to you instead and that moment, when she said no, you fell in love. Then you remember the first time you touched, the first time you kissed, the first time you made love. Each of those memories is a layer of skin, protecting you from the world. You remember moving in with her, taking your pathetic possessions to her place and feeling like you didn’t have enough stuff to make an impression on her life. It never really looked like you lived there, and you never really did. There was always a gig, there was always a late night and a couch to sleep on. Then the babies. Those moments of finding out together: this week the fingernails grew, this week the eyes opened, and your favourite: this week your baby can hear you. From that week on you sang to them both, it was all you had to give them. Their births were horror stories. Blood, screaming, panic, pain - torture of an ancient, ancient kind. Something in you broke with both of them; you got a little bit more lost. You floated, you flew, you did everything you could to keep your feet off the ground that she walked on. You had nothing of substance to give those kids, apart from wretchedness. Alice became their everything.
You curl up and remember all this, and all the while you smell Alice and you want her back, but then you get up and reread the letter. You’ve told her you’re straight, have been for six months. You put a cheque in the envelope, a meagre amount, but something. You breathe slowly into the envelope, seal it and post it. You imagine it travelling to Alice. Her surprise when she sees the cheque causes her to inhale sharply. She breathes in a part of you. You enter her mouth and are a part of her.