I allowed myself to be carried away on the whims of the water and hardly paid attention to where it went or my surroundings. I was lost in thought. Remembering her was getting harder and it had been that way since she'd disappeared. Attempting to construct her as a living, breathing person in my mind was a near impossibility. You can remember people all you want, but it is another thing entirely to try and put them together as they were. It had only been a little over a year since I'd walked in to find her office empty and yet I could hardly piece her laugh. I knew her face and I thought I would have it right and then whenever I would look at a photo of her sometime the following year, I would constantly have thoughts that never lined up. I would imagine her hair looking a way whenever she would wear it back only to have that contradict the photo. I knew her eyes were water-green and vibrantly so but would be caught off guard whenever faced with exactly how stunning they were in a photo. Memories are funny that way, aren't they? Imagining how someone smelled, keeping their clothing unwashed just so you could keep that scent around and be reminded every day that the smell was fading and eventually you'd be clinging onto something that smells like nothing anymore. I hated that.

The tunnel the river ran through was wide and the overhanging stalactites had an incandescent quality that meagerly illuminated the river and I could see that the water beneath me was black, daring me to stick a finger in and lose it. I ate some of the snacks and drank some of the water I'd brought with me.

The dreary light of the tunnel withdrew a melancholy essence from me, and I found it difficult to keep my mind on the present. I am unsure if that is due to some magic quality the place had over me or if I was feeling that way due to my own tired body coupled with my strained psyche.

Regardless, my mind went.

When we met the two of us were at a bar. I'd gone with a few of my friends I knew from college under the guise of having a few beers with friends. Really, we were all single and looking to go home with someone else that night. A bunch of awkward fledgling IT grads covered in acne and neck beards on the prowl. Me and all the other guys that I'd gone with were more comfortable huddled around a table-top game than we were with picking up chicks. We stayed in a constant group at one of the high tables near the bar, ogling women, and cracking jokes amongst ourselves more than we were talking to any. I think we were just waiting for one of us to show genuine interest in talking to some potential lover before the rest of us could join in on pressuring the weak link into approaching them.

That was me.

There were no ringing bells or harps when I saw Alice. She did look good though, that much I can tell you.

She was with her boyfriend at the opposite end of the bar and I sipped my beer while thinking how amazing it would be if I had the balls to go and win a girl like that over. What could I possibly do to get the attention of someone like her?

One of the friends I'd come with, probably the one I was closest with at the time, was named Andrew. He noticed me staring this girl down like a sweating pervert and nudged me. "Be careful, Matthew. He looks pretty big." He said, in reference to the fella standing with his arm around the pretty girl at the other end of the bar.

He did look big.

The rest of our table caught on to what Andrew was saying and starting whooping and hollering drunkenly, saying things like, "C'mon man, a wise man once said, all you gotta' do is go and grab her on the ass." or "Fight him!" Stupid kids say stupid things. Still, even while riding on that little boat down the black river, I found a lingering reminiscent smile.

At some point, we switched from bottled beer to shots of all sorts that I don't remember. I continued to watch the pretty girl at the other end of the bar and at points I vaguely remember the boyfriend noticing me noticing her. I tried to avert my eyes, but she held a gravitational pull over them. He seemed to grow angrier and angrier. I knew he was staring through me.

Finally, the boyfriend left her, probably to relieve himself in the bathroom. That's when my friends started in again. "Go talk to her. Hurry man!" All smiles. Even I was smiling.

I pieced the following from the flashes of memory I have from the night and Andrew retelling it to me the next morning.

I staggered over to her, we spoke briefly, the boyfriend came back. Something I do remember is someone digging into my shoulders with both hands, giving me a jolt of lucidity, and lifting me out of my barstool mid conversation. I spun around, falling over, and taking the bar's string-light decorations with me in a glorious faceplant. I saw the muscular legs of someone wearing tight jeans and attempted to scramble through them to safety. The legs locked around my waist and I was stuck. I struggled but was unable to free myself. Try as I might, I could not buck the angry boyfriend.

Then I felt someone's fist coming down and hitting my bottom. Blearily, I screamed, "Get offa' my ass!" while still attempting to shimmy through the boyfriend’s legs. It was at this point, Andrew would later tell me, that everyone in the bar grew silent and focused in on the ruckus we were creating, some patrons bawling in laughter and some staff shocked. A flurry of blows came down on my ass and back.

Don't ask me how, but I managed to twist sideways and eventually pull myself entirely through the man's legs. I scrambled around to face him while trying to get to my feet, only to get tied up in the mess of decorative lights I'd gotten myself wrapped up in. I jerked and wriggled around, watching the boyfriend turn while coming after me. Somehow, I'd wrapped the line of lights around his ankle and in my panicked jerking to get away from him, I brought him down like a tree. His head smacked a nearby high table and he was stunned, giving me enough time to untangle myself and run out of the bar with my friends trailing behind, laughing, and cackling under the moonlit sky.

The next morning, my back was bruised all to hell and when I called to ask Andrew the specifics of that night, the girl came rushing back to mind.

I returned to pay my tab later in the evening the following day and to apologize for the mess I'd made, totally prepared to pay for whatever damage I'd caused to the bar. There she was, standing behind the bar, wiping down the counter.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Without even thinking, I immediately turned around and walked out. I stood on the curb a long time, spying in through the broad window of the bar and pacing back and forth.

I heard the door of the bar open as I stood at the edge of the sidewalk, staring at the pavement in between my feet. A stranger approached me from behind.

"Hey! You're the ass man, aren't you?"

I turned to confront the person standing there. It was Alice. I could feel the blood rush into my face as I stammered through my words, trying to explain myself.

"Woah," she put up her hand and lit a cigarette. "It's alright. I'm not going to report you to the owners. I'm just out here for my break."

"I'm really sorry."

"It's okay." she said.

"I didn't know you worked here."

"Yeah." she twisted around and walked over to a bench adjacent the entrance of the bar, plopping down.

"Mind if I sit?"

She nodded at the seat next to her.

I sat. "I don't know what I said last night. I'm really sorry for making an ass out of myself."

"That's why we call you the ass man." She laughed and shrugged, focusing on her cigarette. “That and because you took a beating to your ass last night.”

She wasn’t wrong. I had several deep purple bruises I’d examined in the mirror earlier that day. "I promise. I'm not a creep."

"I know that. You were really nice. I mean, I could barely understand a lot of what you were saying, but what I could pick up on, you seemed nice."

"Good." I sighed. "At least I've got that going for me."

She smiled at me, reassuringly. "Reggie didn't hurt you too bad, did he?"

"No. A little sore. But I'll be alright." I shifted in my seat and felt a ping run up my lower back.

"Well you certainly left him looking worse for wear."

I thought of how he smacked against that table the previous night. "I really didn't mean to. Is he alright?"

"Isn't that funny?"

"What?"

"The first thing he said about you was, 'I'll kill that sonofabitch if I ever see him again.' and here you are worrying about his boo-boo."

"Sorry."

"Stop saying sorry. It gets old quick." She said this curtly but blew out a puff of smoke and laughed at me some more.

"Sorry?"

We looked at one another and she cut her eyes in a way that said she knew I was trying to make a joke.

Then silence fell over us and I watched her smoke her cigarette as the streetlights came on, casting a beautiful glaze across her round face.

"Well," she said. "I guess you'd better come on in and apologize to the owners. That's what you're here for, isn’t it?"

I nodded and we went in together.

The owners weren't incredibly happy with me, but I reimbursed them in full and carried on returning to the establishment just so that I could converse with the pretty girl from the other side of the bar. This blossomed into a wonderful friendship that I would have been happy to have if nothing else. I went on dates with other women while she carried on dating Reggie. This went on for six or seven months.

Reggie eventually fell out of the picture and I worked up the courage to ask Alice out on a proper date.

I remember after our first date, we lay together naked in my single room apartment, and she turned to me, pushing strands of hair out of her crimson face. "You really don't remember what you said to me?"

I looked at her, puzzled.

"The night we met. When you got your nickname."

I rolled my eyes. "No. I really don't." She’d posed some version of this question many times before, always giggling coyly.

"You said you'd go to hell and back for me."

I blushed at this. There was no way around it.

We slept in a sweaty tangled mess of each other’s limbs.

It wasn't until after the initial honeymoon phase that I truly got an up-close look at her demons.

I was helping her carry groceries to her kitchen after a sucky two hours at the supermarket, sorting the bags on the kitchen counter. She turned to me and said, "Sometimes I want to die."

She might as well have slapped me across the face. I'd never heard anyone express anything like that in my entire life, let alone be so blunt about it. She shrugged and then went back out to her car to retrieve the rest of the groceries. I stood there for a few seconds, staring at the door she'd walked out of and wondered if she was joking. It wasn't until later that I would fully experience her wrath.

We moved in together and that was a mess all on its own. She grew more lethargic and slept most of the day and night away until she was forced to put on her work clothes at the ring of six consecutive alarms.

She fought me when I mentioned therapy or medication. When the dust would settle, her shoulders would slump, and she would express that she was worried the pills would change who she was. Somehow, she thought the meds would steal a piece of what made her her.

"They wouldn't be me!" She cried.

This always left me at a loss as to what to say. I couldn't argue whether that was true, and I couldn't imagine losing myself. Who was I to say she should take them?

It was the same song and dance for a long time. Her bipolar disorder grew worse. Sometimes she'd stay awake for days at a time, starting some new hobby or artistic project. Sometimes she would lay about for days at a time.

I like to believe the thing that made her take medication seriously was me having my own mental breakdown, but who knows?

It got easier. Things felt better. She seemed happy. We got married and mended any damage done. It was wonderful.

All the sudden I was very aware of my surroundings as I snapped out of my thoughts, looking around the small dinghy and cave-like tunnel. I was still exhausted, but it did seem to help that I could crane back and stretch my legs in the small boat. I watched the stalactites overhead pass by as the river pulled me along and questioned not for the first time their brilliance. Was it magic? Was it some natural chemical formation?

Up ahead, I saw something in the black water. It took a long time before I realized it was a corpse lying horizontal upon the surface of the water. It- it was drifting towards me. I looked down into the moving water and realized this was an impossibility. The water was still moving me and the boat along in the tunnel. That would mean that the body was drifting against the current. Baffled, I watched the body approach the front of the dinghy and bump against its wooden side. As it passed me by, I saw it was bloated and rotting. The smell was like a mixture of rotting eggs and meat. No. It was the sulfuric smell I'd caught onto early in the voyage. This was where that smell was coming from. I held my wrist up to my nose, attempting to block it out. The corpse wasn’t alone.

Up ahead, I saw innumerable forms coming my way, some spaced out, some tangled together and rotting and melding so that their soft flesh had formed some cohesive bond. It made me gag. I saw the eyes of the dead, white and gray and sad. They filled the width of the tunnel, some of them missing the dinghy entirely and some bumping against it.

At a point, it got to be that I was surrounded by them and the dinghy stopped moving altogether. The small boat came ashore upon an island of long dead bodies. Looking further down the tunnel, I saw there was no way I could push the dinghy through them.

I sighed and grabbed up my bat, pulling my pack over onto my shoulders. Looking down at the bodies squished together, I made sure not to step on any faces and began walking atop them. Each step was misery. It was like walking over wet mud and I had to be sure to step carefully to not lose a shoe in someone's gut.

I think I saw a wooden dock up ahead. There was a lantern bobbing from the end of a staff jutting from atop a wagon. Someone was standing next to it.

You said you'd go to hell and back for me.