A snap and a scrape and an open “D” chord break the quiet, but Erik doesn’t bother to look at the fallen guitar. The notes swim around each other, looking for resolution.

In his left hand he holds a sheet of paper with 238 words. Arial font, 12-point type. Left-justified. A printout of the email he sent her six hours earlier. He has read it forty-four times. Each time, it ends the same. With “goodbye.”

This is not the first time he has tried to end their relationship. But it is the last. This time she will heed his pained plea. She will not contact him again.

He saw his chance to save her in a missing letter. 

“Love you.”

No “I,” just “Love you.” This is how she’d closed her last email to him.

The room is silent again. And dark. Between the sounding of the chord and the fading away, night has fallen.

It was a rare moment of strength. She had only taken a half-step back, but in the space where that “I” had been, he found a door to the part of her he had not yet conquered. Her sense of right. He could steal it from her. She would not put up a wall as she had when they first met in Paris, when he’d leaned over to kiss her and she’d turned away. But as he paused there, stunned by her beauty as if seeing her for the first time he knew he could not take that from her.

It was his own sense of right that had written the email. A tender, sweet, sad goodbye.

Erik crumples the paper into a ball. His eyes fall out of focus, expecting tears that do not come. He absently clicks the tiny remote in his right hand. Soft blue lights blink from the speakers across the room, two sapphire eyes mirrored in his own - the only color in an otherwise gray world.

The bottle of pills on the couch next to him would not judge him. Christine would grieve for a time, then live again, finally free.

Erik tosses the crumpled paper toward the aluminum trash can. It clips the edge and bounces back to the floor, rolling to a stop by the neck of the silent guitar.

He might yet choose to live. But he isn’t sure he knows how anymore. He tries to remember the last time he heard his inner voice unaccompanied by Christine’s. And where would he go?

With a graceful swing of his right arm, he throws the remote. It hits the far wall, then falls into the trash can. Music begins pouring into the room. An old song. “Nights in White Satin.”

He looks at the pills again, blurring himself into the music. He will decide before the song is done. About seven minutes, he remembers.

Erik closes his eyes and time-travels to another life, another place. He is a teenager, sitting in a similarly dark basement, listening to this song. Lori’s sweet perfume has all but faded, but he can still taste her goodbye kiss on his lips.

        “And I love you...yes I love you...Oh how I love you...”

He didn’t love Lori. Not like he loved Christine. He can’t imagine ever loving someone like he loved Christine. What he would give for a goodbye kiss from her...

        “Letters I’ve written, never meaning to send...”

He picks up the bottle.

        “Breathe deep, the gathering gloom...”

He twists the cap.

        “Impassioned lovers wrestle as one...”

He looks at the shadowy trash can, barely visible in the voyeuristic moonlight peeking through the room’s only window.

        “Cold-hearted orb that rules the night...”