《ONCE》16. Alone

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Alone

Because of the dreams that he had on a nightly basis, Eric slept until noon every day. He had different dreams every night, all of them with one thing in common: they were all about Sam. Following her suicide at White Oaks, both Dr Richardson and Dr Morton had offered him their support. Still convinced that Sam would have been okay if she had been with him, Eric had no intention of taking either up on their offer. While awake, Eric tried to spend as much time away from home as he could. Stephanie had returned with her child, and, as expected, Michael was beyond thrilled to have his daughter back, and grew increasingly incensed by his son's apathy. To get away from it all Eric left the house and didn't return until late at night when everybody was asleep. He spent his time while aimlessly walking the streets going over in his mind everything that had led up to Sam's suicide, in particular the final two weeks.

Sam had committed suicide by overdosing on tablets that she had been cheeking. After her breakdown in the courtyard Sam had seemed different, like she'd finally turned a corner, and Eric had allowed himself to believe that the worst was finally over. Dr Morton warned him not to get his hopes up, that momentary upturns were common in psychiatric patients. Eric kept thinking about those two weeks, about whether, in his eagerness to believe that Sam was on her way to getting better, he had missed things that he otherwise would have noticed. His thoughts kept his mind occupied for hours while he walked, until he invariably ended up at Sam's house.

He arrived at Sam's house one night having left his house hours earlier upon overhearing a conversation between his sister and his father about whether something drastic would need to be done to get Eric to start doing something with his life. Ordinarily he just stood on the street and looked at Sam's house, but this night was different. He entered the yard, opened the front door with his key, entered the house and, without putting on any lights, made his way to the piano. The few times that he had entered the house in the two months since Sam's suicide he had sat at the piano and played for hours. This time he sat down at the piano and started by playing Debussy's Reverie, Sam's favorite piece. It was the piece that Eric had worked the hardest to master, and nearly every time he went to visit her Sam asked him to play it for her. He played the notes slowly, the way Sam liked it. He played roughly half of the song and stopped. He couldn't go on playing due to his hands shaking, and when he put them to his face he felt copious tears that he didn't know he was crying. Being in the house that was the repository of his best memories with Sam and playing the piece of music that meant the most to her was too much for him to bear, and with his emotions overwhelming him, his inability to continue living without Sam was inescapable. He left himself to cry and waited for his composure to return before leaving Sam's house and walking back home.

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It was 11 p.m. when he arrived back at his house. The lights in the house were mostly off; everybody had repaired to their rooms, making it safe for him to enter, and when he did, which he did without the slightest inkling of fear or doubt about the decision that he had made to end his life.

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