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Beatriceless
He cried everyday for years. Oftentimes, he still does. Lemony will never love again, because he cannot stop loving her. He is simply too haunted by the past, a phrase which here means framed for murder and arson as well as haunted by the memory of one's deceased ex-fiance.
It almost feels as though his enemies have already won. Lemony is technically alive yes, but this pathetic existence isn't really living. Sometimes he wishes he had died when he was rumored to. What life can he possibly have in a world without Beatrice? A bleak world without joy or love?
This physical exile has been forced upon him, and yet it is also self-inflicted. The irony, perhaps, is that the world is so very quiet here. Lemony will waste away at his typewriter and silence will reign unbroken for countless hours until some unfortunate person, which here refers to one destined to discover a depressed writer's dead body, finally comes. They might happen to find his fingers still set upon the keys, for he will have been working on an unfinished poem dedicated to an equally dead woman when his broken heart gave out. They might scream; very dramatic, like a scene from any number of bad plays he once reviewed long ago, effectively shattering the silence.
The Baudelaire orphans will never fully know what great lengths he went to in order to record their story. But of course, he didn't do it for them anyway. There probably won't even be a real obituary for him either. Lemony tries to shake off such wretchedly melancholic thoughts, then shivers; he is so cold all of the time but refuses to light a fire.
Even his heart feels frostbitten, somehow both burning and numb simultaneously. It's another thing Lemony has grown used to. He embraces the ache in his chest because it still remains long after there are no more tears today, and it reminds him quite cruelly that he is indeed alive while Beatrice is not.
Everyday he wishes he could just sleep away the empty hours of another day without her, but his mind buzzes with something poetic like that, and inevitably it persuades his body to rise and make its way to the typewriter. In fact, the only reason he gets out of bed in the morning at all is because he isn't prone to writer's block, and because there's something self-medicating about putting his anguish on paper.
Lemony imagines an alternate universe in which they were married, where she did not believe those lies about him. Perhaps they would have children of their own by now. However, they probably wouldn't be as wealthy, but still happy. Waking up beside Beatrice would be enough to get him through the day, and in this world he'd still remember how to smile.
Now none of these things can ever come to pass. Reality is a terrible crushing thing like that. The world outside, as well as his own personal one, remains dreary and devoid of color. Life is utterly Beatriceless, a word which here means not worth living.
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