Things kept going as swimmingly as they did the first night. Kate stirred somethin so fuckin powerful in me that after I'd met her I found it near impossible to think o anything else. Which wasn't how I planned it, like, but once I had it, I sure as fuck didn't wanna change it.
Before I met Kate, I had a crap job and a crap life. After, I still had a crap job but it didn't matter anymore, because now I had a great life. An unbelievably great life! Soon we spent every minute together, and she was the first person I'd met that I never got sick of.
I thought long and hard about what made Kate so well different after havin met her folks. I think it was that she was a soul from the future, transported into the wrong time, which was lucky for me, but extremely unlucky for her. She had a certain consciousness to her that not many people here had. She could see all the bullshit and all the insanity. Most people just stood idly by for it, blinded by having seen no other way, and the others, like me, were responsible for it. You could really divide the lot of us into two worlds, like. But Kate, nah, like I said she was from the other world. Tha older world, tha smarter world, tha world that felt a sickening pity for it all. She was above us. She was above me, and why she loved me how she did I can'y tell you. World's biggest mystery.
Far more mysterious than Niagara fuckin' Falls, believe me.
"We are different."
Then she turned her head away from me, and out the window. Mad, like. I didn't know wha ta say. I was worried. Worried because now that she knew it was dangerous for her, and worried she'd leave me.
"The saddest thing is that you think you're fighting for a cause. We all think we're fighting for a cause, and trust me, Sean, I believe in it. I believe in us, and I hate that this place isn't ours, I hate what they're doing to us, but that's the hypocrisy, isn't it? I feel the cause like I feel the blood pumping through me veins, and I can see how insane it all is. You're just a foot soldier in a war that nobodies ever going to win."
"Yer wrong."
You know that thinking part? It was well back at this point. The thinking part that I had aborted was kicking and screaming it's way around my brain again.
"Kate, this is how it is. I can't stand by and do nothin' while our people are dying, while they're killing my brother. He died and he didn't do nothin, so fuck all this. Because there's the way it should be, and there's the way it is. And this being the way it is, I got no other choice."
"I know," she said. "I know." Then she lent her head back against the seat of the car, still crying, and like she was trying to get a clear view at God.
I remember feeling so utterly gutted at this point. I felt so fucked. Like Romeo and Juliet or other star cross'd lovers that were just fucked from the get go but it wasn't really their faults.
"So yer leaving me then?" I asked her, almost afraid to even fill the air around me with that thought.
"Sometimes...sometimes at night when yer sleeping I tell myself to get up and leave and never come back."
"Ya do?"
"Aye... but then I feel like my body is glued to yer sheets. I can't leave ya, Sean. I can't. I just want it to be different."
So did I, but it wasn't, like. So we both had scars on out heart that would never heal.
"Sean, I am going to stay faithful to ye until the day I die," she told me.
"Me longer darlin. This place and beyond."
We sat in that car, in silence, until the sun set and until the moon went to cresent. Then we started to kiss.
Now I'm dead, but I'm still dyin' to kiss her.
We had five months after that.
A lot changed. I gave her a ring, we were goin to be tryin' for babies, all that.
Ya know, I could fill every page in this book with happy memories of us, what happened when we got engaged, fuck, how she looked in the morning time when she'd just woken up, but I'll spare us that. It's just too fuckin' sad.
But if yer curious like, everything in those next five months unfolded naturally and perfectly. We fell more and more in love with each passing hour, each passing second, really. Every night before I went ta sleep she'd kiss me and tell me that she'd be faithful ta me for the rest fo her life. And in tha time we were together, the pain o my brother, the weight of the war, the sadness that was Northern Ireland, it faded a little each day. She was like an angel that came into my life and brought a whole lotta light with her, illuminating everythin' that mattered. She was my soul mate, we were two of a kind, and I know beyon a shadow of a doubt that we woulda been happy for the rest of our days. An I know that she loved the shit out of me, almost as much as I loved her.
But the more she loved the shit out of me, the more she worried, the more she made me promise to be honest with her. I still wasn't always honest, though.
So the last time I kissed her goodbye, she thought I was meetin' Couch at the pub. I still think it was best tha way.
I'd been asked ta do something real small, to just beat up some thug that was botherin' someone's wee brother, and I didn't think nothin' of it. I said yeah of course, and figured I'd be back before night time fell.
Didn' happen like that.
The irony is, that this wasn't even my own doin. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I was walkin' up Victoria Street on my way, and the air smelled of the sea and faintly rusting shipyards of Belfast Lough. It was half four but it was already dark. Night always falls early on winter's nights in Belfast and morning dawns slowly. The city was bathed in this yellow sulphur light, and I remember thinkin' tha I was cold and wishin' I was snug somewhere with Kate, my gorgeous Kate.
And those were my last living thoughts.
It all ended quickly. The sidewalk around me shook with enormous force, and a wave of searing air rushed over me. It lifted me from my feet, and for a second too long I could see it all around me; building comin' down, people catchin' fire, blood, people screamin', horrible screamin' everywhere. I'm not sure how I landed, I lost all sense of up and down. But soon I was coffin'd in debris like, and it crushed me, heavy. I opened my mouth to speak, to yell for Kate, but I only found more debris chokin' me.
And then my mouth filled with blood. And then it was over.
Ya wanna know the funny part? It was my side tha planted the bomb.
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