Lilith

I am an awful husband, yes — certainly the most awful husband anyone can ever expect. The kind you only meet in stories, in novels and films, the ones people warn you about. Terrible. Pathetic. A beast.

Perhaps I should begin from the start.

· · ·

Honestly, I never thought my life would come to this. I left my home at nineteen, believing I was choosing love over everything else. My parents didn't stop me. They didn't even try. My mother stayed silent, and my father looked away as if I had already stopped existing. I was studying then, halfway through a degree I no longer cared about, working small, forgettable jobs just to get by, filling notebooks with lines and being convinced I might become a writer one day. I thought I was building a future for myself, something stable or real. Instead, I walked away from it all without looking back, convinced I was finally making a choice that mattered.

All because of her.

Miranda. My muse, my curse. Just a year ago, we got married. Our love had grown quietly, despite the disapproval that surrounded it. My parents were always proud and never accepted our marriage. Miranda was an orphan, a girl with no family name to uphold, no ancestry to speak of. In their eyes, she had no roots, no blessing passed down through generations of prayer and belonging. In our Catholic home, family name was not just pride; it was identity, inheritance, almost a matter of faith. My parents believed blood carried duty, and duty carried God's approval. Anything outside that order felt, to them, like disorder in the eyes of the Church itself. It never mattered to me. I had never been someone who cared much for lineage or the hollow prestige attached to it. But to my Catholic parents, raised on sermons about purity, heritage, and "right families," it was enough to keep them perpetually uneasy.

I understood their pain. Parents are often bound by their own narrow convictions, forged by traditions and reinforced by faith, where questioning feels almost like sin. I explained this to Miranda, and she endured every bitterness with silence. Sometimes she would ask, "you love me, Ray?" She knew the answer, yet still longed for it. I had no words. Love, to me, was a language beyond the reach of human speech. It was vast, an endless ocean without measure. To try to quantify it would have been to diminish its truth.

Over the first six months of our marriage, Miranda became my everything. I was devoted to her, though I didn't fully understand how deep it had become. She was everything to me — my sun, my moon, the air I breathed. When she was beside me, I would bury my face in her hair and breathe in her scent. When she was gone, I would hold her clothes, as if they could still keep a part of her with me. And the outside world, my parents included, whispered. "He is bewitched by that woman," they would say, their voices sharp with judgment, their words sometimes cutting me like blades. But I didn't care. I chose not to hear them. All that existed in my world was Miranda.

Perhaps it was a sickness that had taken hold of me.

But obsession, unchecked, untamed — is a poison. And perhaps that poison had already rooted itself within me, for one day, over a quarrel too petty to remember, I completely lost myself. The vase I hurled at her from a few feet away was not merely an object, but a part of an unknown fury I had long kept buried inside me. It struck her head, and as fragile as a human head can be, it collapsed with a sickening, final thud. At that moment, the fever of my obsession broke. It was February 10th, 1899. Evening.

I saw her fall — not gently, but with a sudden, jarring drop. Her body twisted midair, struggling for a moment before surrendering to stillness, like a bird struck down in flight. Shock stayed on her face for an instant before fading as she hit the floor, her limbs falling outward like a discarded doll. The vase lay shattered beside her. I rushed to her side, but it was too late. Her breathing had already stopped. She was gasping desperately. Her eyes, once full of life, stared back at me vacant and hollow, as though even her spirit had been too stunned to leave. She was so still. So unnervingly still. And I stood frozen.

Miranda, my Miranda, was gone.

The madness of my love broke with her death. But I could not feel relief. Only the deep, gaping void where she had once been. There were no legal inquiries. No one came to search for her. Miranda had no family, no history, no legacy — only me. It was too easy, too horrifyingly simple, to erase her from the world. Under the shadow of the Flame tree in my backyard, I buried her.

The lie I told was simple. "She left with another man" — and the world, too preoccupied, believed it. She was forgotten to everyone. Just like that. And then life continued as it was. Each morning, I started watering the Flame tree. It became my routine. My home, however, became a tomb without her. The absence of her became too unbearable for me to face. Guilt followed me everywhere, holding on tighter and tighter.

And so, I fled.

I retreated to my grandfather's old crumbling estate in the countryside, hoping that solitude could somehow save me. But all I found was more silence. Each day bled into the next like an endless monotony — write, eat, sleep. Yes, I started to fill in my cheap notebooks again. The servants thought I was going mad. They tried to reach out to my parents, though something always seemed to stop them or perhaps they were simply afraid of me. I could hear them whisper behind my back that I would never recover from whatever madness had taken hold of me.

· · ·

And then, soon after, my dreams began. At first, there were just whispers — soft, almost imperceptible. In the dead of night, I would wake up to the faint sound of footsteps. Half asleep, half dreaming, I would see her — Miranda, or something like her, moving in a way that felt too smooth, too unreal to be human. The air around me would grow heavy, filled with her scent, mixed with something darker I couldn't quite name.

It was as if she never left.

Each evening, as the sun went down, I found myself waiting by the lake beside the estate. The moon hung above, casting silver light across the still water. In its pale glow, my reflection looked back at me like an aged, weary man. I waited. I knew in my bones that someone would come. And every night, just when the silence felt unbearable, she appeared — or again someone like her. Her form was faint and shifting, almost like mist rising from a lake. She moved with an elegance that defied all earthly laws, her feet barely touching the ground as she ascended the stone steps by the lake. Her figure looked almost translucent in the pale moonlight. She hummed, a tune so soft, so delicate. It was a lullaby I remembered, though I couldn't recall when I had first heard it.

She sat upon the crumbling wall of the lake, her feet dangling, her body seeming like a silhouette. Her eyes that once burned with love and warmth were now pools of darkness that I could not fathom. I had watched her while stood frozen. She would begin to braid her hair, her fingers moving with an ancient grace, like a ritual.

I wanted to reach out to her, to touch her, to call her name. But the words stuck in my throat, and my hands trembled as I watched this shadow-woman before me. In her, I searched for the wife I lost. In her eyes, I saw only the reflection of my madness. And I understood that there was no escape from her.

Something I buried with my own hands refused to stay buried.