“The waters know what it means to be battered to and fro.”

That was the last thing my beloved darling wife said to me, before jumping fearlessly from the Golden Gate Bridge, into the murderous murky waters of the San Francisco Bay.

She didn’t bother to inform me that she was literally standing on the brink of destruction when I called.

How could I be so selfish, so insensitive, not to inquire after her welfare, or location, especially after publicly and intimately mangling her dignity underfoot?  And, oh, the repeated lies I spun that broke her delicate, trusting heart in two, multiplied a thousand times over.

My dearest Lily did not commit suicide.  It wasn’t in her bones to hold life irreverently.  She lived joyfully, beautifully, and so very contrary to its foul ending.  So, no.  Lily is free from stain.  It was I:—I was the villain who condemned her, pushed her, from that fucking bridge, to her long spiraling death, into the cold unforgiving sea.

As I write, my shame haunts every corner, inch, of my mind.  And, within every slowed identical breath I take, my guilt besets, eats, at my core, my heart; or at least what’s little left of it.

When impeded upon in predisposed reflection, I am constrained to tears when I think about the crime(s) I committed against the one, and only person I was soulfully, emotionally, bound to, upon this earth:—She was my light.  We were tethered in illuminating likeness, and when I ruthlessly destroyed Lily’s belief in me:—I murdered our light.  I destroyed, us.

Presently, I can no longer bear the weight of hollow frivolous words, as I feel it does my precious Lily a disservice to try to describe a tragic woebegone fall, from the perspective of a heartless man such as myself.  I find it quite ironic, that I who loved her most in the world, should be the scoundrel to deliver her into endless grief, and everlasting darkness, of which I’m shortly about to descend as well.

This note, is for you Lily:—As is, my life.

“Ever thine. Ever mine. Ever ours.”

Signed,

Johnathon Parish

“Wow, well, I gather this letter explains the bullet through his head,” said Detective Philonous.  “Appears to me, like an open-shut, case.”