The Quiet Ruin of Thomas Whitley

“Hide me in the wind, and wash all of our problems away,” Thomas Whitley screamed as the waters swallowed him up. His screams were more like a prayer, a curse, and a summoning all wrapped in one.

The bitter moon hung reverently above him as muted swamp lilies sang and the tiding river swallowed the last of his tired spirit.

Eleanor Jane Martin stood feet away, watching her love sink lower into the abyss. The promise of a new life waiting on the other side, if only she could remember to find it.

He had been loyal, even in ruin. His love for Eleanor was never meant to be as they were, instead, fated to fade from this world like an exploding star being sucked back into its hole, forevermore.

“You were meant for me in every way and I will wait, only for you…” Eleanor wept, crawling back to the quiet tree-line, wondering what would come next as she looked down at her black dress, black shoes and black veil. She wouldn’t need more mourning clothes, it would seem she had done enough of that in the recent years. First, the loss of her mother, then her father, her sister, her neighbor and now, him. No one would notice, no one would suspect a thing, and soon enough, it wouldn’t be long until she joined him.

Just hours before, all had seemed well in the non-magic part of their world. Lamps flickered across narrow, cobblestone streets, the stark contrast between the life she lived in her fathers decaying estate and the one she lived with Thomas on the banks of the River North were strikingly different. Even the rust had turned a mourning shade of black as it crawled across the bars, intertwining with the vines and honeysuckle that dotted the bricks.

She was nearing her early thirties and already carried the air of someone who had lived decades longer than anyone else— and maybe she had. Problem was, she couldn’t remember, she didn’t know. No one had told her any of her history before dying. The books at the Town-Hall were all wiped clean. All she had left was Thomas, her letters and what lie within the gates of Martin Manor.

Not a single Martin was left, but her.

“You can’t go…not yet, my love.” Thomas whispered, kissing the tears from Eleanor’s cheeks as though it was the last time he would ever see her.

“Until next, we meet,” he smiled, never taking his eyes from her face as he sunk deeper and deeper, finally disappearing.

Eleanor Jane Martin walked somberly, with renewed purpose back to her father’s estate. Thomas’s words still echoed hauntingly behind her, a feeling of something she couldn’t shake hung heavy, and it didn’t help she was late. The clock bells thundered through the mailbox at Martin Manor signaling the next hour.

The halls still smelled strongly of lilac, dried lavender and roses, same way her mom had—a constant phantom, haunting her quietly as she walked by townsfolk who would rather hide their face than make small talk or pleasantries with the woman who always wore black, always cried in public and always clutched tightly to sealed letters as though they were her own personal, hellish bible. The confines –of which—she dared to spill as she spent the rest of the evening, as usual, alone and tending to the roses her dad left in his will.

They weren’t just any ordinary, run of the mill roses. They weren’t prized, or hunted, or revered. They were magic. His roses only bloomed reluctantly in the darkest of shadows, under the cover of growing night, as most secrets do. Never when it rained and never when the moon hung directly overhead. Instead, hiding under the looming brick fence as though, they too, craved sorrow and they too, wanted to be left alone.

“You must tend to the roses.”

Her father’s words penned boldly in the final line of his will.

“Nightly, and with tender care, for they are your future, your light and your wayward will.”

It was the only letter she opened and read, like a sordid child’s story. Night after night, morning after morning, trying to stick precisely to the rules, exactly as they were written and intended.

That was her intent.

We all set out with good intent, good purpose. But those too, can be obscured, lost, and forgotten. Mistakes and missteps can happen to the best of us.

“My dearest heart, I don’t think this is what he meant…” Thomas Whitley once noted, as he walked into Martin Manor’s midnight graveyard of miraculously blooming roses. Darkly pretty and virulently pink. Their petals turning inward at the thought, or slight hint of drizzle or intrusion. Any passerby in the neighborhood might have thought the roses to be ghastly or barren in the sun—and would have rightly ripped them out of the soil for being such an eyesore, but not her.

“They sense your presence,” Eleanor whispered, closing her eyes in aggravation as the blooms curled in one swift motion back into a crisp bud and the entire garden evaporated.

“There is magic in Botanics,” Thomas continued, unbothered by the rose’s shyness.

“They are much too similar to you, my beautiful rose, my moon, my starlit night… only blossoming away from others and their prying eyes...if only the world could see your magic the way I do, the way the roses do…”

Eleanor Jane Martin remembered every sickly-sweet word that man had ever spoke, but only the ones that tasted like poetry. His words pierced her soul and read her blood, line-by-line, stilling her fears and quieting her anguish. He made life worth living as the decades passed. But, still, amidst all that, they could be no-ever-more.

Not here, not in the land of regulars. Not when he too could die like all the others. Not when she couldn’t remember life before him, life without him, life with him.

It didn’t help that Eleanor Jane Martin carried every letter he sent her, every important document, all tied neatly and securely with a blue and white ribbon. She carried them as close to her heart as she could, trailing her bloodlines, a map only he had. Black Hematite and a large round Selenite sat in each of her dress pockets. She took these with her everywhere she went, every day, every place, no matter what. It was as though she couldn’t trust her house to keep them safe. She even had dress pockets secured for her most precious items so they couldn’t get lost, as though they might crawl out if she didn’t keep her hands there, checking every few seconds for something to disappear.

Thomas Whitley had been the only person who actually saw her for who, and what she was. He never judged, he loved her wholly and unconditionally—and that’s what made this so painfully tragic. It had been during one of her walks that she first saw him, sitting alone on the banks of River North. A place that would become so special to the both of them. He wore a trailing black tweed coat and an off-white linen shirt, fully buttoned but loose. He watched the rushing currents swirl past as she had done hundreds of times below, wondering what worlds lie beneath them, watching back.

He was so intense and so still that she couldn’t help herself but interrupt.

“You are in my spot,” she mused, her eyes widening as a smile lined his in reply— “I know. But I, like you, were not simply observing the water and wishing to jump in. I was trying to talk to it, trying to have a conversation…”

“You shouldn’t do that,” Eleanor whispered, curiously. His piercing brown eyes glowed like desert stone. His skin pale but still touched by a sun that didn’t exist this side of the river, at least not amidst the low-fog and cloud-filled skies. Theirs wasn’t a world ruled by any measure of any intensity. Even the moon paled in comparison to what she saw when she looked at him, and he—he studied her as though it was his favorite thing. A quiet familiarity that unsettled her soul, making it clear he had done this before. Time and time again.

“We are not meant to travel this world untouched, you and I,” Thomas continued, as though the conversation had stretched miles. “People like us are meant to be altered, to be touched, to be craved, to live in whichever world we chose. We don’t belong here…”

Eleanor smiled politely at the sheer madness of his words. Letting them hit her in the face. The audacity, the boldness, the bravery, the stupidity.

“You are a fool, as I suspected,” Eleanor replied, her lips pursing in a mocking tone as she clutched the hematite in her pocket.

“I am a fool…but that, that won’t actually save you…”

Thomas pointed to the cold stone she kept in her pocket.

“Trivial things…trivialities…” Eleanor muttered to herself, taken aback by his continued bout of boldness. If this was how all commoners and townsfolk talked, she wanted no part in socializing.

“I think it’s my time to leave, I wish you the best with your conversation. I hope River North has a lot to tell you…”

“Oh, but it does, all you have to do is listen.”

Eleanor lingered just enough to grow more curious about this mysteriously charming Thomas Whitley. She was drawn to him with a force both unrecognizable and irreconcilable. They would soon walk arm and arm, hand in hand, clinging to every word the other spoke beneath ghostly tree-tops and the bones of branches, rambling through life, love and loss. Steeping in a peculiar loneliness that comes with those who live too far within themselves. Thomas Whitley lived as though he was her other half, the piece that had always been missing, listening to her, hanging on every word that dripped from her hallowed lips with an attentiveness no one else could muster—as though her smallest utterances were sacred and to be revered and wished upon, and to him they were. He listened as though he might learn something new, as though he hoped she would say something different, for once.

“Why do you talk to the river, why do you taunt it so?”

Eleanor lie next to him on a blanket as they watched the currents pass.

She couldn’t see the clouds darkening Thomas’s sweet face, his hesitation bubbling up— “because it remembers us, it remembers everything we don’t…everything you don’t…”

“What does this river remember?” Eleanor mused, his heart stilling beneath her ears as she wrapped herself tight. It was clear she didn’t know.

“Everything we are missing out on, everything we have lost, every person, every place, every child we can’t save…”

Unease tensed her body as the first drops of rain fell from the skies above—freezing and heavy as they hit, marking her skin with every pass. The smell of wet grass and damp soil flooded her nostrils. She was a cursed woman and yet, as afflicted as she was, she was the happiest in this moment. How nice it must be to have no memory.

“My dear, dear Eleanor, you don’t remember. I wish I could keep you here...It’s not your fault…but I will remind you, always. That feeling you feel when we met. The feeling you get when we meet—day in-and day-out, starting over, and over, and over again. The river, this river swallowed our son, Julian, but… my dearest heart, you won’t remember. Come tomorrow you will have forgotten how it spit him out downstream. How we lost him, how he did not die... He was picked up by another family. They thought him to be an orphan. I have spent my life—both trying to find him and save you, but you won’t understand.... When you meet me again next week on this same river bank and the same twelve hours pass, we will be no-ever-more. So here I am…I love you in the present, I love you now, and I love you while I have your twinkling eyes and your tender lips and your heart full of promise and hope for a future.”

Thomas paused, his voice cracking knowing she would never read those letters burning in her pocket.

“In this world, or the next. I will find you, we will find each other and we will love as hard as ever. But for now, anchor me to this very spot, our spot, the spot we lost everything, and I will meet you here again, I promise.”

His faint smile trembled, his breath stopping as he stepped back into the waters that mirrored his soul, knowing what would happen next if he asked her to come with him.

“I send all my love to you and nothing less. Find me here…promise me…”

The river wading around the edges of her skirt as she stepped in after him. His unspoken words filling the void between them as he pushed her back.

“I will remember you…until next time…I love you, forever, always…” he whispered.

And with that promise, those words—Eleanor stepped back into a time she couldn’t remember, alone. Soon enough the days would fall back the way they started—and yet somehow, someway the waters of River North would call her, summon her to their mighty edge to start the cycle over, anew.