June 14th 2011

Twenty Six - Vilyat’s Lychees

Cheated at the market, for lychees that he now knew weren’t sweet at all, Vilyat loitered at the corner of his street, wondering what to do. His mother was a woman who didn’t deal with things like this very well and would no doubt use the cane, or the flat slats that were piled neatly in the kitchen for the new windows as they would be the closest to hand, and of the right shape and weight. If it escalated, and she held her grudge until his father got home, and she may very well do that, as the guests, who would be the ones biting into the sour lychees would be arriving with his father, then the thin strip of a bamboo sapling that his father kept for moments just like this one would make an appearance.

Vilyat decided, that with his poor exam marks coming up next week, especially in Latin, which his father prized above all, perhaps because it was the most useless subject, that he couldn’t afford a tense prelude and so he snuck through the back gate, and in through the window of his room, and got up onto his table and removed the wooden panel in the cieling to get at the money he had been slowly siphoning from the groceries each week, and which had made the inflation of food prices quite a topic of conversation around the house this summer.

Back at the market, not having the courage to confront the lychee seller, who in any case was the father of the girl Vilyat was very close to fingering, very close, he walked further up to bara bazar and hunted around for the sweetest lychees that he could find. The sellers didn’t take too kindly to him sampling their merchandise, but Vilyat had been snatching things his whole life, and felt that he had gotten a good survey of what was at the market that day. Finally with bushels in hand he walked back to his house and arrived to find it in a hush. It was already a quarter to five and the sun was dwindling purple and dark over the roof of the house, and the living room looked like an old cellar. In it, below the cream ceiling fan, sat his grumpy mother, and his stiff father, and the two lumpy guests, his father’s bosses from the department. They all looked at him. He looked back at them. They looked back at him. Life slowed and Vilyat, dumbly, held up the lychees for them to see. They looked at the lychees. Finally, to break the impasse his mother said, ‘Oh here he is! He’s been gone half the day!’ and motioned him into the back of the house.

As he walked inside with his mother, one of the men cleared his throat and told his father, ‘Ravi, you shouldn’t let your boys wander around like that, who knows what trouble he can get up to. It’s good to have some control, you know?’ In the kitchen the cane was already out and whilst it beat him, his mother pleaded with him to not cry out, for their honour. Having came to the conclusion that this time life had bested him fair and square he took the lashing quietly, flailing his arms like a small turtle, but not uttering a word.

Later, once he’d showered and had been curtly re-introduced to the two guests, he sat on the small corner stool and watched as the lychees remained untouched. When his mother asked the bosses to taste the lychees, one of the men said, ‘Oh I can’t eat anything sweet, it’s terrible for my teeth.’ The other one nodded in agreement, ‘Das is perfectly right, nothing sweet for me, I have to really watch my sugar levels. Why not give one to the boy?’ His mother did not offer him one. Everyone quietened down again, as the slow, sweaty afternoon dripped on and the lights began to flicker on in the street outside and Vilyat wondered how you can tell if a lychee will be sweet just by looking at it.

Posted at 8:23pm.

I removed this because gay -->

January 12th 2011

Twenty Four

1

This being the last job that she had ever wanted, especially as the uniform was so awfully ugly, weekday mornings had recently become the most difficult parts of her week. Then, one morning she woke and couldn’t breath easily or move her limbs. She lay motionless and looked up at the ceiling and prayed that this would go away. She had lived alone for years now, and there was no one there to help her. After about five minutes this strange phenomena left her and she got out of bed and felt quite shaken and disoriented. That morning she left her sheets as they were and closed her bedroom door before heading out.

On her way to work in the middle of the big city she saw a dog that had gone wild and was frothing at the mouth. City workers scattered like pin tacks and didn’t know what to do. She stared at this scene for as long as the bus sat at the red light, and something in the scene so affected her, that soon she began to cry as silently as she could manage. The man sitting next to her had his headphones in and wasn’t paying much attention and she was thankful.

At work she was quieter than usual, preferring to stock the shelves, or work out in the back by herself. Then gradually she felt the light elation of forgetting that came from the repetitive task she was doing, and she thought that it was selfish to ask too much of life really, and that it was enough to just be a good person and not get too twisted about wanting too much, because there are so many of us, so many in China, and so many in India, so many in this just one city, that it’s really enough to go through life quietly, being busy, and that when you die, well then you die and nothing means anything, and it was enough if people, who would come to see her buried said, ‘she was happy.’ She wondered if she would feel this way if she was in a relationship with a man, but that was a sore point, and it was no good getting into that now and she went back to sorting latches for garden gates.

At lunch, there was something new and fresh about the stories the crew were telling at the table, and although she had nothing to add, still she sat close to them and listened intently and smiled and at one point, when Steve talked about something that his daughter had said, she laughed. She felt a warmth from them and an acceptance and when it was time to go back to work she felt melancholy. She packed away her half eaten egg sandwich.

That evening, back at home, she took out all the weeds she could find in her garden, and was surprised that her coriander had flourished in the corner. She sunk her hand into the soil and enjoyed the earth resting on the back of her palm. She stayed crouched like that for awhile, as the dark came and the evening cooled and as worms slid around in the earth underneath her and beetles and flies buzzed and hovered in the silent air and her neighbour’s cat sat on top of their brick back fence and stared at her slackly.

That night, having done all the dishes and dried them and vacuumed the whole house, even below the heavy sofa, and behind the tall bookcase, which nearly fell on her when she had tried to move it, she sat on the edge of her bed and looked at her feet. She had changed the sheets. She then thought about calling Susan, but she had two kids and it was pretty late, and as soon as she thought about it she wondered what she would say to her anyway, and how one sided the conversation would be. But what she wanted now was to talk to someone, anyone, maybe someone that she didn’t even know. But where would she find someone like that at this hour?

She sat there, on the edge of her bed, and wondered and wondered and it must have been very late, early in the morning, when she could keep herself up no longer that her thinking faded and cut out, and she fell to sleep with thoughts of regret and fear and of her garden and dogs and latches and the turquoise of her uniform and the deer in the forests near her dad’s old place and the streams and the fallen leaves and her mind ached with the rays of the burning, benevolent sun back there.

2

In his early thirties, he grew anxious that he was approaching a significant crises of purpose. To preempt this he threw himself into a number of individualist sports, such as tennis, swimming, and cycling. Three or four years passed quickly, he got fitter, moderately more attractive girls slept with him, his career flourished, and before he knew it, he was in the enviable position of taking out a big loan to purchase a house. Many of his acquaintances were quite jealous. In fact he met with a number of them he hadn’t seen in quite a while just to tell them he was able now, finally, but still with some difficulty, to buy a house. Everyone nodded sagely, and wanted him to come to some kind of harm.

He asked a girl at work to marry him underneath a brilliant sky at a hotel restaurant in a very tall building. And as she really had no better offers and he was endearing in his own way and a star at work, she accepted. It hurts too much to continue this story, whenever I think about what may have happened to him, I feel parched, and dry, and I lie on my bed and become very still. How can I love this man who is so lost?

3

He did not feel comfortable in this new blue suit. It was too tight up the top, and it was too loose in the middle, and he didn’t even know what was happening with his pants. They were too short. At the train station, the regulars, who he had travelled with for years, but had mostly never said a word to, unless there was a delay in the schedule, all felt the arrival of the new suit, and people shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t feel like going to work anyway because he felt a cold coming on, but he didn’t want to walk home from the station either, that would feel really odd early in the morning. In the mornings, he was used to walking to the station, not walking back. And what would he do back at home anyway? Day time television made him feel lonely, and the Internet he had at home was so slow that it would just enrage him. He did have some chores to do, but he could do them later, only the overflowing kitchen bin needed doing

The train came, but he didn’t get on it.

He walked to a park and watched old people play with their dogs and thought how little he knew about dogs. Perhaps there wasn’t that much to know. The dogs wondered about his high pants, and what it means when a human wears pants like that. And the dogs began to run about again in a controlled, balletic chaos.

Finally just before lunch time he walked into the an alteration shop and got the bottom of his pants taken down a little and felt much better. At work, there was a big meeting because the company had lost a key account and there would have to be layoffs.

(Dogs graphic by Kevin Burns.)

Posted at 9:40am   

December 12th 2010

Twenty Three

She was a new type of female—self interested.
She was a failure of the modern type.
It’s probably enough to say that she was the modern type.
It’s probably enough to say that she wasn’t a failure.

‘To tell you the truth, I can’t be bothered,’
She said as she sat there in the crevice of a dark, thick oak,
Bare legs shaved and spread open when his conviction broke,
She said she’d had quite enough of his romance. ‘Thank you.’

It didn’t matter that she didn’t know what she wanted.
She knew, as he did, that now she had the right to want it.
As his ardor writhed and waned, he suspected,
That in the last great and terrible century his rights (and wrongs) were voided.
A sad petty excuse, and he wouldn’t say it, but maybe he really meant it.

He left her, hounded,
That she hadn’t felt a thing.
But she had,
| 17 | Adnan | 25/12/10 |
She counted.

Posted at 9:44am   

December 9th 2010

Twenty Two

He used to be faster, stronger, smarter, funnier, but now he was fatter, slower, dumber and more serious and he knew it. He sat in meetings all day and counted down the minutes, and looked and talked at the chattering faces, and he shuffled files and emails around and said things that made him want to dig and crawl into the earth until he passed out.

Last year, out of desperation, and a boredom that clung to him like a tick, he had a little affair. It had dwindled, but he still had to work with her, and the meetings she was in were twice as long as any other ones. When they began, they would go for long walks after work. Since they worked in the middle of an industrial wasteland, run down over the decades, there wasn’t much beauty to see, but they shared with each other all of the things they had been thinking for years but didn’t have anyone to tell. At first, they talked about their childhoods, his was happy, her’s was sad. They talked about their children, he never saw his, she would have preferred to see less of hers, and they talked about the trips they’d been on. Both of them had been to France, Thailand, and America. She had been to Borneo and Russia, but both were very long stories, and not as interesting as you’d think.

After about a week of denying how they felt, and then another week of deciding what they should do, they finally checked themselves into a hotel close to the city. He researched the hotel on getaways.com.au and looked for a room that wouldn’t be too expensive, but wouldn’t be cramped either, and the location had to be convenient to both of them. They had families to get back to. He picked the Dorchester, Tuesday night special, $175 (reduced from $275) for a double room.

The night wasn’t a success. They had mixed up the times, and she had arrived late. That had made him anxious, and he was so distracted and distant when she had gotten there that the sex was formulaic and full of insecurity on both sides. He tried to smoke a cigarette afterwards but it came to nothing, and he put it away in the ashtray where it sat for the whole of that night. They weren’t comfortable enough to tell each other how disappointed each was with the other, but through the distance they kept in bed, and the slow considered movement of their limbs, and the forced pace of the conversation, you could tell.

After that, they had met twice or thrice, and the sex had gotten a little better, but it wasn’t even close to what they used to have with their partners in their heydays. He told his closest friend about the affair and his friend told him to enjoy it and then stop. And then the friend had asked him about the sex. He didn’t have much to say. What he actually liked about the whole thing was the hour or so they’d spend next to each other in bed, naked, either silent or making up word games they could play. He felt that he was falling in love with her but only because his threshold for love was so pale and washed out.

But soon, she had to think of her children, and it was harder and harder for her to get away to something that didn’t really mean anything. He tried to think of things to attract her: he put in extra effort into his love making, trying things he hadn’t for a very long time, and he tried to take her to a Japanese restaurant that he used to like, but it all fell apart and both of them came out sadder than they had gone into the thing. In the end she stopped responding to his emails.

He found himself very quietly spiralling out of control. Not in grand gestures or blunders but in small, sad little moments, that he piled up like leaves in his yard. He would get off earlier than his usual train stop, in the city. He’d walk around, trying to keep pace with everyone else. He was paranoid about being caught in the act. But what act? Lonesomeness, of loneliness, of aloneness. But in a roundabout way it made him happy. It was something controlled, he willed to be alone, to make his life seem more important than it really was. He wanted things to be different than they were. More different than he knew was possible.

He would walk and look at women. Among men only the old, rundown, or the crazy attracted him. Sometimes he would follow their slow progress and marvel at everything that life could take away from a man. Life only takes things from men. It’s only men who lose things. That’s what he thought. Women belong on this earth, men do not, and so, the earth, the wind and air and water provides for women, nourishes them, but men, nature is rightly afraid of men and so it retaliates, it uses thunder, and floods, and fire to kill, and crucify, and punish men. And he’d let his mind wander like that, around and around, up and over, through, behind and under, his mind wandered, broke it’s back and it sauntered, shook itself and then it cantered.

Enough. 

Not being able to rid himself of the dark bile that coiled around his heart he decided to buy a convertible.

It was going to be a Mercedes. He’d pick up neat girls who looked after themselves. Girls without any marks on their skin, and immaculately done eyes, with golden gossamer hair.  He didn’t want trashy women. Of course he would settle for trashy women, but it’s best to aim high at the beginning, it’s best to be a little confident he thought.

He took a day off work so that he could visit the dealer in his gleaming white and glass plated showroom in a forgotten part of the city centre that was very hard to get to. He arrived and adjusted his suit and opened the collar of his shirt. He looked good. He looked like someone you’d want to sell a car to. He looked too busy to have a broken soul.

The dealer treated him like a lost cousin. There was no professional distance, they were family and family would get the best deal. He liked the dealer. He wondered what the dealer was like as a young boy. He decided that he had been a bully, a heartless, scared, insecure, testy, dark bully. Even so, he still liked him. He wanted to be the dealer’s friend, it was in both of their interest that they get along. He walked around and looked at the car he wanted. He wanted it in black. They had it in black. He wanted some options, they had all the options he’d ever want and need. He felt a tight panic in his heart which he smothered.

He bought the car. He had been fighting his wife about it for months, he’d been using his children to lobby for him, and now he had finally done it. He felt like a human being, someone who now had something precious, something worth having, something that materially spoke to who he was and as he walked out of the showroom, with the dealer gripping his shoulder and baring his impeccable dealer’s teeth like a vampire, he felt alive.

When the car was delivered to his house, his wife stopped talking to him. She knew what the car meant, and she cried at the train station the next day about the silly, silly man she had dedicated her life to. But she didn’t know back then that he’d turn out like this and she didn’t know that she would turn out like this. She began a form of low intensity warfare which she planned to win through attrition. Her front line was an icy, sharp silence. She kept his daughters away from him but he didn’t care. Well he did care but he was too distracted. He was distracted by the shape of the car, an aggressive, black, lithe, sleek hunter, a leopard or better a black panther. Its coat of metal shimmered in the sunlight, and it’s decals accented its face with eyes, and ears, and it’s silver grill was a cold, hard nose sniffing out prey. 

He would look for women who, for whatever reason, felt weak enough, and vain enough, to need a man with a car like his. And that’s what he’d try to give them, he’d take them out, he’d take them shopping, he’d meet them after the manicurists, they would take weekends away down south in country towns and as the evening gathered he would admire her body, her nails, her hair. He would obsess. And he’d talk to them as they fell asleep and give them strength. He’d tell them constantly how beautiful they were, how much he needed her, how much other men wanted her and how jealous he felt sometimes, how madly jealous. He’d hold them up in the air on stilts and admire them, and admire them, and admire them. As for himself, he didn’t want to be understood, he just wanted to talk. He’d talk about all of the things that he was thinking about, things he couldn’t tell his wife because she’d think he was being foolish, or unintelligent, or not thinking about the serious things that were pressing on them from all sides. And he’d fuck these women. Hard. With gusto. With flair. And with these thoughts caroming around his head he grabbed his new keys and took off to go for a drive around the city, like a boy.

He left his garage and the car felt endless. It moved with such pure grace, with such reserves of absolute, unfathomable power, and his ability to direct it was so acute and finegrained that he felt there was no logical separation between him and the car, and the car and the air. And with this car, he felt like he was cheating nature, that he had snuck into her disguised as the air. He was out of his mind with happiness.

The sun was out and joggers darted around like wasps, mothers pushed their prams like bees, and children swarmed like maggots over everything. He was having a great time, just staying in the pocket, in the groove of the car.

He coasted down Elizabeth street and turned into Oxford. This was prime territory. This was where you put your roof down. But at a stop sign, as he reached over to the button you had to press to fold the roof down, his hand froze, and he frowned. For a while nothing happened but slowly he came to realise that he couldn’t put the roof down. He couldn’t. Why? He was too … embarrassed. And he got so lost in that jolt of realisation that he nearly ran into the back of the white car in front of him. He paused and then pressed himself back into the tan leather seat. He was too ashamed to put the roof down, it felt like it’d be too much, that he’d be revealing too much about how bad his marriage was, and how unloving, and how contingent it was on him staying exactly as he was. He thought it’d advertise to everyone around him, that in fact, no, women didn’t find him attractive anymore, that they would turn away from him in the street and in restaurants, and that every time that happened it would pinch his heart, and tighten his neck, and the roots of his hairs would grow hot and hurt. And if he put the top down, everyone would look at him and know all of these secrets that he had only begun to find out.

But he’d brought the car to feel honest!

He wanted to be happy again. He wanted to forget his job, his wife, his parents, his house, his credit, his holidays, his children, oh god he wanted to forget his children so badly. To be one person again. And now this. This inability to press a goddamn button, and in public, and after all this money spent. He became gloomy, and angry, and he pursed his lips, and held the steering wheel hard as he drove the car to a cafe and parked. He sat in the car and brooded until he felt that passersby were looking at him, judging his lack of courage. He got out and locked the car (using the key rather than the remote) and walked over to get a coffee. At a distance a couple of girls looked over at his direction and at the shimmering play of sunlight on the car’s sinewy torso, but they soon turned away their heads, he was too far away, and from the way he walked they could tell that he was married, very married and old, just a little too old, and he’d be trying, and sleazy, and he’d be too much work. He was in far too much of a tumult to notice them.

He stood in line for his coffee and calmed down. And soon he thought that everything was just fine, that he was working himself up unnecessarily. Of course it’s a little hard to put the top down. He’d never been a flashy person, never one to show off, but the time was now, he had worked hard and he needed this. And so with renewed vigour and kneaded confidence he grabbed his latte and walked back to the car.

He sat there with his finger on the button again and he felt a weight so great on his head that he bowed down into an arc from the load and looked down at his legs. All the other cars had roofs, for a reason, so they wouldn’t stand out, so they wouldn’t get dust and dirt in them, so that the owners could go around not being seen, not being ogled, not showing off. But he wanted to be seen. Otherwise what was the point of all this? But if he took down the roof, then there was a chance that he’d be figured out, thought about badly, but maybe it’d be something more, something else, maybe he’d be needed, and maybe even more? Life could be good for him again.

He took the finger off the red button and eased the car out onto the road. He didn’t know where he would go now, but he didn’t want to go home. He didn’t want his wife to see the defeat in his face and disfiguring his body. So he just drove and drove. He drove until he left the city, and drove through highways and over rivers and streams, and he drove on rough country back roads past broken down farmhouses, and fields, and small towns where everyone had grown old and quiet. No one could call him because he had no reception on his phone. No one tried to call him anyway. And as he took the long, languorous road back from the backcountry, in the twilight of that late summers day, smiling and wistful he looked at the button, and decided to press it softly, with endearment.

Nothing happened. It didn’t work. Something was wrong. The hood was faulty. But nothing was wrong. At first he looked away through the side window and smiled, he just smiled and smiled, and then he laughed a little, he couldn’t believe how beautiful life could be, and how he had kept himself from it, and how much more he had to live, and how silly he had been, a man like him, with a car like this, and the roof not working. And he chuckled. And then he laughed even harder, and he laughed faster, until he was howling now, he was howling and hooting and roaring with laughter. The car, so well insulated from the sound of the world outside, took and held this moment of happiness, and forever kept the fragrant scent of this man’s laughter.

(Drawing by Rob Duarte.)

Posted at 7:17am.

I removed this because gay -->

December 7th 2010

Twenty One

She walked at a steady pace up the steep hill leaving the beach behind her as the morning woke and stretched and slowly lightened the trees and cars and shops to her side. She looked down at the ground and ignored the scattered cat-calls from the middle eastern boys who drove past in their bright cars. She thought about where they lived and how far they were from home. She thought about how later they’d say goodbye to each other and in the coolness of the morning, in the sleeping silence of their parent’s house, each would have a moment of solitude and reflection before falling asleep. A moment when they felt alone. She wondered what it’d be like to be in the room, out west somewhere, Blacktown, or Fairfield, or Liverpool, watching one of the boys fall asleep. That made her smile and she uncoiled the headphones she had been holding and put them into her ears and played a soft, easy track that she had downloaded the week before.

When she was about to leave the party last night her friends had asked her how she was going to get home. She had told them that she’d ‘figure it out,’ that it was a nice morning and that she felt like a walk. They had looked at her oddly, but they knew about these moments of melancholia that she felt, and even enjoyed, and since it would be light soon anyway, they felt she’d be safe and that she was entitled to the silence of her own loneliness. Her friends weren’t usually so patronising, and most of them were half-gone this early in the morning especially as everyone could afford the drugs now, but something in the way she dealt with things, delicately and with trepidation, encouraged this kind of protective behaviour. Even strangers wanted to protect her. Without having thought about it too much she used this to her own benefit.

As she walked further and further up the hill, and as she got closer to her apartment block, she felt an awkward feeling of restlessness. When smoking pot with close friends she usually called this her ‘incompleteness.’ Now, the last thing she wanted to do was to go home. But, when she tried to veer off onto a backstreet, away from her house, she only made it a couple of meters before a cavernous sense of helplessness and weariness overcame her and now she felt very tired and really wanted to do nothing more than go to her warm bed and bury herself underneath her newly bought Egyptian sheets. She turned around and started walking towards home again.

As she approached her house, she saw a blue Toyota four wheel drive, which was at once so familiar, but in that context, that morning, that day, that early, when she was feeling that way, was such a violent contradiction, that she was forced to hide behind the nearest thing she could find: a dark green, weathered wheelie bin.

Immediately, as soon as the first spurt of fear wore off, crouched behind the bin like a timid soldier, she started to feel a little silly. With her brown leather heels, and her short, tight, low cut, dark floral dress, and her hair falling neatly onto her soldiers, she felt the incongruity of what she was doing to who she was trying to be and she stood up. She hadn’t yet planned to walk anywhere, she just stood up. Her destabilised heart told her that for now that was enough. As she looked around, she saw that the car was empty. She looked towards her apartment block and couldn’t see anyone about. The morning was gathering strength, and the brightness grew to a higher pitch and reverberated across the squat apartment blocks of her wide street. 

This was ridiculous! She came out from behind the bin and started walking towards her house. Her heels were caked with mud and she had scraped her knee and it looked red and raw.

She approached the doors and she mustered her anger. How dare he!  She let herself in downstairs, but as soon as she entered into the darkness and silence of the apartment block atrium her courage gave way. She leaned against the wall and felt afraid that he had come back. She didn’t know what was happening. Her mind narrowed down to just this moment. She couldn’t think of any other possibilities other than he was here to hurt her somehow. She knew he was upstairs, and he was angry. Something had happened to his thinking and now he wanted to take it out on her. All of those things that he hadn’t said to her had mixed up in his heart and had created a dense venom that he had now brought for her to drink. She wouldn’t! But what would she do? Why was he here? It was so physical. He had no right to use his keys anymore, not without calling her, so why was he here at her house? Her house you bastard! She grew desperate and stretched and stretched her hair. She scrunched up her face and if someone had walked by, they would have thought that she was a having a strange, held-in, internal fit. She stood there rifling through reasons and motivations but her mind moved in a useless, viscous arc.

Since they had broken up she had been slowly losing the power to predict what he was going to do, how he would react, and now it felt like a stranger had come and parked a car, and broken into her house and now lay in wait to molest her, to fuck her violently. For a second she thought about calling the police. And it was this one thought, a thought so extreme and so funny, that stood her up and punctured the panic she was feeling. She looked upward in anticipation and walked to her door where she stood for what seemed like a very long time but was only half a minute or less. She got out her keys, put the keys into the lock very slowly, very quietly, and gently pushed open the door. Her breathing crawled, and grew small, and then it caved in on itself. But the apartment seemed empty. Nothing moved, and the air circulated in a familiar, feminine way. All of the rooms were dark. She walked in and the door hissed at the hinge. Nothing. There was no one here.

What was going on?

She lay down on her sofa and wondered and wondered and was wondering when suddenly the weight of the whole night, the heaviness of the whole long morning, the drowsiness of the whole week, and the burden of feelings for the whole of that unending April pressed down on her and she tumbled into a bottomless slumber that was akin to death.

She was woken by the buzzing and vibrations of her phone. She rose now carefree and having forgotten what had happened earlier. She picked up her phone and saw his number and she didn’t feel any of the fear and disquiet and confusion that she had felt earlier, she felt like she had been on a long journey and now was very far away.

‘Where have you been? I’ve been calling all morning,’ he said in his controlled tone. This is how he always spoke to her now.

‘I’ve been at home, sleeping.’

‘Well, I’m outside the house, I was supposed to pick up my speakers today, what happened?’

She couldn’t remember anything about that and she stayed silent.

‘Are you ok Josie?’

She remembered then how much he used to love her and how much he still loved her. She remembered how no matter what she had tried, her love for him had fractured, and how it had slowly broken off and fallen away and had been lost, until she woke up next to him one morning and saw that only some small pieces of it was left. Memories pushed into her consciousness. She remembered the way he giggled loudly when she fell over or ran into something, how bad he was at buying gifts, she remembered his satirical commentary on people they’d pass by, and she remembered that comforting, woody smell that he had. She remembered the deep revulsion that she had felt at her own cowardice the afternoon that she’d broken up with him. The way she couldn’t look into his eyes to comfort him, to tell him what was really going on. She’d run away from him like a child. She just didn’t want to give him what he wanted anymore, she’d wanted to keep it all for herself. She was and wanted to be gluttonous and greedy. But she also felt the huge emptiness that he’d left behind. She felt that, all at once, like a thunder in her chest and she now saw the effort it would take to fill in the crater he had left behind and she wondered how she was going to do it.

‘Josie, are you ok?’

She felt sick. She felt queasy. She wanted to throw up. The glare in the morning, her smeared makeup, her sweat caked thighs and her aching feet made her feel inhuman, unreal, ungrounded. She felt as if she’d been floating for a long time and she didn’t know how to get down. She needed to shower, and she needed to sleep, she needed to eat something fresh, green, something she had made by hand, and she needed to not see another human being for as long as she lived.

‘I’m fine, I’ll let you in,’ she said and sighed at the enormity of what lay ahead for her.

Soon, as he gathered what he needed to take away to add back into the life that he had been given back as his own, she settled on the sofa, put a pillow over her legs and watched him carefully. He was a strange stranger, and nothing in the world moved for a very long time.

Posted at 7:40am