You'd better not.
Alyssa rolled over; her eyes were wide open. The sun had barely risen, and a few small rays broke across the bed, shattering the pervasive darkness. It was not her bed. She never woke up in her bed on Sunday mornings. This one, like countless ones before, began with her quietly dressing in a stranger’s bedroom.
The sky was lit with a rosy brilliance as she slipped on her skirt and looked under the bed for her high heels. She was a pretty girl with long auburn hair and creamy skin. She had dark blue eyes that were full and laced with sparkling sadness. Her hands shook as she buttoned up her jacket. She took one glance at the sleeping form in the bed she had just left. What was his name again? Justin maybe? Jason? It didn’t matter. They were all the same. Everything was the same; the weekends fell into patterns. Another stranger’s bed every Sunday was her new life. At 27, she was broken inside.
She slipped into the morning without even a look back. As the light hit her she felt an omnipresent heaviness in her stomach and through every limb. It was the shame she could not shut down. Sunday was the Lord’s Day she used to believe. But now it was nothing to her. God was nothing to her, just like the world he had created. The sidewalk was full of cracks. So many mothers’ backs would be broken on this street. So many children would cry when they realized what growing up meant. She had certainly never realized in all her girlish dreams that it meant nothing more than the realization that time was nothing, that everything was nothing. Growing up is only growing old. Her father was a preacher. He had taught her to love God and the world in all its beauty and unfairness. She had not spoken to her father in two and a half years. Not since the funeral.
Alyssa walked slowly and unsteadily. Her body knew exactly where it was going without a thought. She regarded thought as the evil of existence, the evil she could not escape. Some days she was happy, but never Sundays. The taste in her mouth was of iron, of blood. She put a piece of gum in her mouth, but it remained. She stepped out in the street. A few taxis were running the daybreak shift, and eventually one pulled up to her. She got in, the vinyl seating stuck to her skin.
“8th and Heathrow Drive, please.” she said, surprised by how hoarse her voice was. She could barely hear herself. The driver nodded and drove away. She leaned against the window of the cab watching the blur of familiar streets go by. She touched her face gently, only to find that she was crying. The driver was watching her in the rearview mirror. He finally slowed to a stop. She paid him, and he gave her a tender smile, which she could not return.
Alyssa was standing in front of a graveyard. The sky was now yellow and soft, lighting the gravestones with a blanket of peace and acceptance. She walked among them, her heels sinking deeply into the supple grass. The stones themselves seemed to absorb light, and not reflect it. She finally found the one she knew she had been going to all along. The date on it read two and a half years before, the name was Matthew, Matthew of Matthew and Alyssa. She gently knelt down in the grass before it, and then continued to fall until her head was on the ground. Then she began to cry. The sadness burned her like a fire inside that no one could put out. Tears of pain and unending heartache poured from her eyes and into the ground. Then she looked up, and softly ran her fingertips over his name. She whispered into the empty morning, “I will never love anyone but you. I promise.”