A Love That Destroys Them - The End

It ended on a Tuesday.Elena woke before Gabriel. She dressed in clothes that no longer felt like hers and realized she did not want anything. The love had succeeded too well. It had built the room, locked the door, thrown away the key.The knock came at nine. Gabriel's clock chimed. She stood with the kettle screaming and did not move. The knock came from the outside, from the world they had killed, a language they had forgotten.Gabriel appeared in the doorway. They looked at each other, and in that look they understood: the love had eaten them. There was nothing left but bones and the echo of a nocturne that would never be played again.He moved toward the door. She watched his hand reach for the knob and thought of the eighth night, how simple it had been—knock or don't, open or don't. Now there was nothing left but the choice to stay, which was not a choice at all but a reflex, a heartbeat in a body that had already stopped breathing.He opened the door. It was no one. The hallway was empty. The knock had been a radiator pipe, or nothing at all—the sound of their own fear made audible by silence too large to contain it. His shoulders dropped. He had been hoping for a rescue.He closed the door and slid down to the floor. She sat beside him. Their shoulders touched, and the touch was enough, and the touch was too much, and they sat in the silence that had replaced the music, breathing each other's air, while the love expanded, pressing against their lungs, their ribs, their hearts, until the air felt thick with everything they had given and taken.At some point, Elena stood. She walked to the piano and pressed middle C. The note rang out, pure and terrible, the first true sound in days, and Gabriel flinched. She played the nocturne badly, haltingly, but she played it, and the room was too small, and the love was too large, and something had to give.What gave was Gabriel. He stood and placed his hands over hers on the keys, stopping the music. "Don't." Exhausted. Finished. "Please. I can't hear it anymore."She looked at him. He was crying. The tears were for the nocturne, for the music that had been his mother's and then his and then theirs, played too many times in too small a room until it had become the sound of the room itself, the sound of love becoming indistinguishable from suffocation.She took her hands from the keys. The last note faded. The silence that followed was the silence of a body after the heart has stopped.She walked to the door. She did not look back. She opened it and stepped into the hallway, impossibly bright, and walked down the four flights of stairs and out into the cold street, and she walked until she could not see the building, until the only thing she could remember was the sound of middle C ringing out in the silence, and the look on his face when he said don't .She did not know if he followed her. She did not look back. She walked until morning, until she found a diner and ordered coffee she did not drink and watched the sun rise over a city she no longer recognized. She did not go back. She never went back. She lived, and she aged, and she learned to sleep alone, though she never stopped hearing the nocturne, never stopped knowing that she had been destroyed by a love that was perfect, and that the destruction had been worth it, because nothing that came after was ever enough.

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