Chapter One: Autumn, and Everything After. Part Two
You sat on the tan, leather couch, hugging a red pillow, slouching over slightly while your gaze melted into the colorless walls. Your left hand mindlessly twirled a string from the side of the couch where the cats had clawed at it. It pulled longer and longer as your thoughts pushed towards the air and away from here. I glanced over into our bedroom. The sun had set, and it was dark except the small streams of amber streetlights freckled by the droplets of the rain soaked window’s glass. Outside the slender trees, already bare of leaves with graying bark stuck their skinny arms to the sky as if in surrender. The bed was unmade with the large and inviting comforter and sheets folded over towards the foot of the bed. I wanted to hide under the sheets and never come out.
But I was frozen in the flash of your lightning. All I could manage was a death grip on an already cold piece of fast food. I held it like the Lord’s Supper and said a quiet prayer. You come to realize that one of the most unbearable things of real tragedy is that its not actually tragic. There was no music. No meaning. It was sadly unpoignant, not epic. There was no audience of thousands of sympathetic eyes. We wouldn’t have made it into Homer or Sophocles. We were dying a quiet, nameless death, surrounded by folds of silence. All while a great noise in the pit of my heart was bellowing violences, frenzied and desperate. It is a startling thing to so suddenly, at once, realize your love is not magnificent.
Outside, the menacing rumble of the recycling truck making his late evening run bellowed across the street. A dog was barking. Another couple was arguing. The world was absorbing us, our own great tragedy, into itself. Seamlessly, everything kept moving. It didn’t stop. The eyes of the world weren’t turned to us, angels weren’t actually gathering at the sound of our conversations, but doors were definitely closing. This wasn’t tragic, it was just an event, the world worlding itself on and on, static noise buzzing indistinctly. It was the dog barking. It was the groan of the truck. It was strange, but at that moment, of all the things that could have run through my head, all I could think about was how you had wanted to paint the walls something different than that lifeless cream that had come with the house. Yellow maybe. Or some fancy named color that I wouldn’t even recognize. I don’t remember exactly. I was sorry we never did that.
We were not magnificent.
We sat unspeaking for a while longer, such ferocious silence broken by intermittent periods of soul breaking argument. Your stubborn beauty even through harsh words and strange cologne clung, and wouldn’t let go. That alien scent was like veils at a funeral. I should have been furious. I was. Furious, I mean. But the way you looked stopped me from igniting. I regret that, even if I shouldn’t. But I saw such sadness in the shallow mirrors of your eyes. Your quiet glance a symphony of no notes, a dying love spilling out its ghosts like embers on the floor. In your own way, in that moment, I knew you were saying goodbye to me. I sat down. I stood up. I was terrified that if I stopped moving I would just disappear. I was standing right there, but you, you had already forgotten me.
I asked the stupidest things.
“How long has this been going on?”
As if I really wanted to know.
You looked up and off to the side as if calculating some horrible equation. Your finger twirling the loose thread of the couch as if flicking the beads of an abacus. There was a long, hesitant pause. I shook my head in disgust and asked if you needed me to get you a calculator. Sadly, it was probably the most satisfying thing I said all night.
“Two months.”
A dizzying number. What a forgery we had been! Crafted with such care and time. Our love a great artifice crumbling.
“How could you?”
As if I really wanted to understand the logic. As if there was one. As if that was what I even wanted to say. I wanted to scream and break things until my voice cracked my skin and unfurled my soul from artery and bone, until I just burned out like cinder and became absolutely nothing but the thin air. I wanted the world to notice. Every damn time I breathed in I caught that cologne haunting ribbons of the air. Phantasms of your absent lover, morbid ghosts roving about.
I stood so still in the everywhere silence.
“We were dead before this,” you whispered. “You just didn’t know.”
“How long is before?”
You didn’t reply.
You didn’t even look at me. I disappeared.
“Did you mean all those things you said about me?” You were a mistake, you had roared. You are all my sins.
“Yes.” One syllable. It summons to itself hours of previous argument, hidden now amongst the silence and the depth of the room, gathering to the surface the fathomless oceans of this nothing we were speaking, crushing me.
“How did it come to this?” I meant it as rhetorical. One of those things you say just so you don’t have to listen to the silence anymore. I sure as hell didn’t actually want an answer.
“I lied to myself about you.”
“What?”
“You’re just not what I wanted. I thought you were. I thought—I thought you could be…”
When a stranger insults you, rejects who you are, it can be written off as superficial. The faulty azimuth of a random strike. It glances off your atmosphere. Harmless. Who are they? What do they know? But you. Oh God. Flesh of my flesh. Bone of my bone.
“Great time to figure this out,” I said. Is that all I said? Pathetic.
It didn't even phase you.
You continued on as if I said nothing. Which was honest. As biting retorts go, this would have been in a dark corner somewhere near the bottom of the list. What I said was so little as to be nothing. And so you continued. As if these words had been rehearsed so many times they could not now be interrupted from tumbling from you. How many times you must have repeated them in the dark as I slept, carving them into your lips, building up their charge.
“We should never have been married.” Lightning.
The blow blew my ghost from its bones.
“I lied to myself to make myself happy. I told myself that you were what I wanted. I loved you.”
I felt as if I was standing next to both of us, watching our argument.
I was neither living nor dead.
“I thought I loved you, at least. I thought that was enough.”
A moment. An aeon.
I forced myself back to cling to sinew and nerve. I felt myself binding to bone and synapse. For but a moment. A moment. With great effort I told my mouth to move.
“Loved?” I think my skeleton spoke.
“Loved,” you said. Firm and undeniable.
Loved. Loved. Loved.
My soul stretched and drifted again. I was impossibly away.
How many times did I die that night? All your words led to such lonely roads, and like spilling streams they burst from your lips, whispering, all guilty things and goodbyes. It is safe to say that we had turned into something monstrous. You said nothing again after that for some time. This whole thing had taken hours, but it was in spasms of words, the frenzied uncovering of secrets followed by vast expanses of quiet. And of all the cruel things you said, the nothing, that breathless, wordless void, emptied me. The clock strummed its dispassionate beat. I was a great, wandering uselessness.
My hands were shaking, and I rubbed them for a second as if to pretend I was cold, but quickly put them in my pockets. I felt as I always did when we fought, or when I thought anyone was mad at me for that matter. Nothing else was important except resolution. The whole world narrowed to a point. My chest became heavy and tight, it literally felt like my heart ached. I wanted to fight, but as always I felt the poverty of my words. I didn’t want to hurt you, and I didn’t want you to hurt me. I suppose in that sense I am a great fool.
I watched you stand up and stride across the room suddenly, and for a small moment I felt relief, thinking perhaps the silence had gotten to you too. But no. This wasn’t the same.
“I’m going out with some friends tonight.” Pulling the long black strap of your purse over your shoulder, you quickly grabbed odds and ends, jamming them one after the other into the bag. Lipstick. Makeup. Toothbrush. Comb. You were evacuating. It was an evacuation. Was that damn clock getting louder?
“I’m not going to be back tonight. In fact, I don’t think I’ll be back tomorrow either.” How casual. How light.
“You’re going to see him again tonight, aren’t you?”
Again you say nothing. But only for a second. When you spoke, you didn’t answer my question, though. You said the strangest thing.
“If you need me just call my cell phone.”
What?
I never understood why you said that. Not even now. What was the game? Was it some test, some desperate trial in our last hours together in which I was to prove that I needed you, even after you so readily disposed of any need for me? Would you come back to me if I called? Or was it another insult? Am I a child to you, that I should call you in the long hours of the dark, in your absence, because I am helpless and alone? How much more then would I prove my worthlessness if I called you?
It was probably nothing. Maybe the silence did get to you, like it was getting to me, so you just had to say something before you left. Maybe your skeleton spoke out of turn, an impulse, and your spirit was even now cursing it. Maybe you were just being decent, a genuine offer filled with the last vestiges of a love that apparently had died a still, quiet death while I simply continued ignorant. An offer that hoped it would not have to be fulfilled. Damn your charity.
You turned from me.
Say something, I screamed to myself. Come courage! But it came too late. Night beckoned you and you ran through the door into its embrace. The jealous sound of my eyes as they followed your motion betrayed what I was too scared to say. You moved with poise, as if it had always had to go this way, and you knew it. You strode through the door like kismet, leading the aeons in your train. I stood no chance. I breathed in the jet stream of your wake, the flutter of your hair, the craft of your escape. Cigarettes and cologne. It was then that I noticed the pretty thing strung around your neck on silver thread was a ring. Your ring, laced with such contempt. My ring. Your bare finger had been free of its lament, twirling the loose thread of the seam of the couch. We were dead before this.
After that I sat in the kitchen alone in the dark, leaning against the dishwasher for what seemed like hours.
I breathed in the midnight air. Head down, looking at nothing.
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