Rainn felt the arteries around his heart tighten and his breaths shallow. “Not her too,” he whispered through his gritting teeth, tears cutting grooves across his face.
“I can’t go through this, not again. I haven’t got it in me…”
He had reached his breaking point. Put a man down too many times, he’ll eventually stay there. Rainn was defeated. He had fought and barely won way too many times before. “To what end?” To live to fight again someday? The war was never-ending, the agony incessant, and his will shattered in more pieces than tears he’d shed. He knew that now, that there was no way out this time. It had all led to this — resignation. The saddest day of Rainn’s life.
He was so utterly broken and hopeless, so worn-out and angry that his silent pleas for absolution rang loud across all planes of existence. And from the vast and unknowable darkness, a crackling voice echoed back. He gasped in terror; figured he’d finally lost his mind. But The Voice permeated his empty room, soothing him with promises of joy. It offered him hope and he quickly stopped questioning it.
Rainn desperately begged The Voice to save him — through her. “I care for nothing else.” The Voice offered him everything — relief from all his burdens and her warm breath on his neck.
“But it will cost you,” The Voice reverberated across the abyss.
“Anything…”
“It will cost you one small and very specific thing of little significance to you.”
“Anything!”
And so it was.
Everything started falling into place the very next day; forgiveness, reconciliation, and passionate first steps toward a glimmering future, The Voice all but forgotten, like a hallucination in a drunken stupor.
The first glimmer was marriage, the happiest day of Rainn’s life. “I can’t believe this is happening,” he said to himself. “You deserve it,” his friends all reassured him. But he still couldn’t believe it, it was all so new to him, even now, two years later. A lifetime of pain will do that to you.
It was the life he’d always wanted, full of all the simple pleasures that everyone else around him took for granted. He had thought himself destined to live a life of solitude, never truly happy, yet now he found himself full of hope and joy. He had made it.
Next came the pregnancy announcement, the happiest day of Rainn’s life. Everything he had ever longed for, everything he had based his happiness on, it was all coming to fruition and all leading to a stillborn son — the saddest day of Rainn’s life.
The devastation ran deep through both of them, but Rainn still had the love of his life and this kept him on his feet. He was strong for her as she descended further and further into a darkness that ultimately consumed her whole. Their marriage in shambles and her happiness lost inside the smallest coffin she’d ever seen, she took her own life a year after their son’s birth and death.
Rainn found her on their bed, bloody sheets spilling from her body. She had been so deeply gone that she couldn’t even get out of bed — she just used whatever sharp object she could reach, her wrists torn apart as if she was trying to dig something out of them. A visceral scene that paled when compared to what she felt in her heart.
The saddest day of Rainn’s life, seven years after The Voice first promised him everything.
The Voice.
On his knees beside the bed, drenched in his wife’s blood, he hears a familiar crackle and instantly remembers.
The Voice.
“Why,” Rainn barely cried out. “Why did you do this to me?”
“I did not do this,” The Voice said as it grew nearer.
“You said one small thing…”
“And it was, I took it the very next day, and it was so insignificant that you did not even notice it. I require a barter, even if only symbolic.”
“How, then, why…”
“This is Love.”
Rainn held his dead wife and ran his hand across her cold, ivory cheek. He felt like screaming, but there was a knot in his throat and a pain so perversely excruciating, it all but paralyzed him.
“This was always going to happen if she loved you. All I did was allow it to happen, per your wishes.”
“Bring her back,” Rainn yelled with the last bit of strength he had in him.
“I cannot. This is Love.”
“Bring her back,” Rainn barely whispered through his sobs.
“This is Love, but you thought you knew better. Love is what kept you apart, but you thought you knew better. It was protecting you. Both of you. You intervened.”
Rainn tries to mutter something, anything, but fails.
“This is Love. Love is not just a feeling, but a fierce and relentless force of existence. Gods bow before it, and those who do not, soon regret it. The path that was chosen for you was chosen for a reason. Everything is entirely and perfectly the will of Love, but you thought you knew better. You intervened. This is Love, and whenever one intervenes, the consequences are guaranteed to be severe, not as a punishment, but simply as proof of its intricate and delicate plans.”
“I just wanted to be happy…”
“This is Love. However painful life may get, however desperate you may be to get what you think you want, everything is exactly as it should be, and it is so for your sake. This is Love. There are no exceptions.”
“Please, I didn’t know, you didn’t tell me, I’m so sorry…”
“I did not.”
“I didn’t know…”
“This is Regret.”
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