I held her close to me at the airport drop-off, clinging violently like industrial strength Velcro, hoping that one of my rough plastic hooks could snag itself on her frayed edges. She said she had had enough, that I just didn’t understand her or where she was coming from. I don’t really understand why she’s leaving, so I guess she’s right. I told her she was a fireball--bright and unyielding--she was flattered, but called me an extinguisher, a placid lake to her restless conflagration. She said something about wanting to trek to California before she met me, that she had always wanted to, but didn’t--until now. Until this very moment, in which I can feel her love being pried away by the sunshine and sixty degree weather, faux beach spirituality and ninety-nine cent Buddhas. She took her guitar. The same guitar she played to tell me she loved me by covering other band’s ballads. Years ago she had broadcast herself in front of her peers at her high school’s coffee house, but looked only at me. Now her gaze is set on boardwalks and piers, hoping that passers-by might throw some cash into her guitar case.
She threw a sad look at me, but still bright with hope of an ideal future. She threw her arms about me tightly, squeezing and inhaling deeply the only impediment left before she could answer her “what-ifs.” She said that if she didn’t find out now what she was capable of, what she was missing, that she’d waste her life miserably, throwing worries and doubts around like massive medicine balls that would crash through the ceiling of her mind, only to drop their heavy weights into her eyes. Sometimes I wish that when she spoke, she actually made sense. She’s got everything she needs right here, an affirmation of all she could do in her life lies in a single “I love you,” but no, here and now, in this airport, she’s letting her arms fall about me, her hands lingering around mine--I can hear the harsh tear of the Velcro, her detachment from me synchronous with the ripping of my heart--like a sheet of paper torn, each half carelessly thrown aside like a middle-schooler’s assignment on a Friday. She tore herself away, and disappeared down the corridor.
Commence program auto-pilot.
I drove home, willfully vacant. You never understand how difficult it is to really clear your mind, to stop your thoughts, until it’s absolutely necessary for your survival. I managed my way back to the apartment, without having thought too much about anything. I put the key in the lock and jarred the door open with a kick at the bottom corner, because it sticks. I threw the keys down on the kitchen counter, and Christ, here it comes again, I can feel it welling up in me, a deluge of thought brought on by everything that reminded me of her in the apartment. The emptiness of it and the reverberations of my own actions within, painfully remind me that I’m the only one here now.
Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac are bad influences on your girlfriends.
I’d stopped the rolling stone briefly, for a few years, but she started to gather moss and I don’t think she liked feeling so aged. I was a wooden, splintered wedge against a fireball, she consumed me, and rolled on. I bet she hadn’t thought ahead of time how fire burns itself out in the California sands, like a cigarette, snuffed. She’ll eventually find herself cool and indifferent in the presence of the same things that seemed to excite her. The thought of her happy, and without me, seems impossible.
At least I know it’s impossible in the reverse. Shit. I hate how much she really gets to me.
I didn’t understand this. I could give her anything she wanted. As much as I loved her, I can’t help but hate her. Why would she leave me? Why would she be so selfish, how could there be anything else that she absolutely needed? Christ, to go so far away from me, and for what? A beach full of sleazy Sal Paradise figures and warmer weather? And what was so wrong with me that I wasn’t enough? How dare she! I can imagine her, in some coffee shop, these oh-so-postmodern hipsters all around, filling her with false promises of finding some sort of ideological “peace.” Why can’t she understand that that “peace” doesn’t exist, that anywhere one goes is a new obstacle awaiting. Conflict is the height of the human experience, and to avoid it like this, to deny that it even exists and to steal off to San Francisco, Monterey, Salinas, LA, or wherever her whimsy takes her, is just preposterous. She’ll be back when the loneliness gets too much for her. The social anxiety she’s had for years will eat her alive in the crowd of an unfamiliar population, and she’ll be back, and I’ll still be bitter. I’d welcome her back, but as she hugs me, my face will contort in such disdain at the thought of having been chosen second. I can only imagine what beguiling jerk will take advantage of her sweet naiveté, and lie his way into her heart for a night, just to win a spot in her bed, and then be gone by morning. He can’t make her toes curl like I do, that’s for damn sure. God, he better not. Fuck her if she lets him! Christ, how do I handle every intricate imaginary scenario that enters my head at every second of every hour?
The phone startled me out of my string of thoughts, and I eagerly lunged to greet who I hoped was her, even though at the same time, I would really loathe hearing her voice.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Lenton? How’s your DSL provider working for you today? Well, I wanted to let you know about Stramgard’s Cable Service that boasts…”
Click.
Damn.
I went back about the kitchen, surveying the colorful assortment of coffee cups awaiting a wash. The cups are as individually identifiable as people of different nationalities in a crowd: an earthy brown clay cup, kiln-fired, with a light blue glaze; a Starbucks logo against a plain white enamel; an antique-looking dark brown and khaki swirled cup from Ocean City, Jersey that seemed to resemble a honey pot in its round shape; a pink one with green polka dots; one with yellow, pink, and green pastel stripes; another brown clay coffee mug, taller than the rest and with a noticeable heft to it, with various artsy portraits of women and an art deco feel, using only shades of brown, blue, and the slightest hints of pink; a pink mug with brown polka dots. She really loved polka dots, whatever chance she got to decorate something in the apartment, it was usually laden with polka dots. She made our curtains out of fabric she found in a craft store. She sewed and stuffed her own pillows, made her own wrap-around skirts. You give her a project, she could probably execute it on the first or second try with the skill of someone who’s been at it for a while. It was either polka dots, or reprints of pre-Raphaelite art that was meant for a dorm room, but then placed in a carefully selected frame. There’s John Everett Millais’ “Ophelia” in the living room, propped up against the wall, behind a glass frame (she hadn’t found a frame border that seemed to match the mood yet); John William Waterhouse’s “The Lady of Shallot” in an aged, dull, gold frame that stares out from a wall opposite a window in the laundry room; and a taste of the Art Nouveau style of Alphonse Mucha’s “Four Seasons” in a cherry wooden frame on our bedroom wall. I guess it’s not so much ours now as it is mine. My bedroom. I’m alone.
My laments of the accents of the apartment, just made me feel like she was more gone than ever. The walls of the apartment were decorated with her undeniable presence, just as sure as my heart was decorated with memories of her, and there was no corner of it to which I could turn where some ghostly thought of her didn’t linger. My heart, I’m sure, was now polka dotted. Damn it.
The phone again bounced its sonorous call across the room. I sauntered over to answer, no longer expectant, and pretty indifferent to whatever telemarketer soliciting my business in their rhythmic, rehearsed, robotic hum.
“Hello?”
Click. They hung up.
Ugh, I just want to go somewhere where I don’t think of her. I need to go blank for a little while. Fuck the dishes, fuck the phone, fuck her art, and her polka dots. I’m going to bed.
*****
6:55 AM and the alarm on the night stand goes off. I hit the snooze button hard, like it deserves it.
I could feel the weight of her ghost limbs beside me in bed, the tickle of her earthy spider silk hair at my nose, as I inch closer to try to reach an arm over her--this time I succeed in only keeping the heavy air of where she once laid under my bed embrace. The crisp sheets seem to taunt me with their lively green stripes against the empty white space in between. Those stripes would have outlined her silhouette, she on her side, the peak of her hip having the highest altitude on her topography, and right next to the lowest dip--a valley of a waist. Her side of the bed was cold to the touch.
What kills me the most is that it’s a Monday morning and I have to be at work in an hour. Nothing around me seems to have changed, and yet, there’s this tremendous event that’s shaken everything inside of me. I expected the world to end, but, what’s more torturous, is that it’s stayed just the same.
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