There was a general electricity to the air. It crept up on
me slowly with each step I took further from my home. I’d been lost in an
unyielding despair since she left and it was only after abandoning my own
company that I really managed to shake the rejection off me. The evening was
warm, that kind of sticky humidity that consumes your oxygen as it filters
through rested lungs. I’d forgotten what spring felt like. The months that
winter claimed had been colder to me than I thought imaginable. No woman to wrap
herself around me in the blanketed haven atop my bed sheets. No hand to hold mine and fend off frost. No
happiness to thaw the ice from my heart. She had breathed a storm into those
months, her absence the thing that gave it force – her name the sound that
replaced thunder, my tears a constant rain. I’d never felt a typhoon as
terrible as that which she created for me as a parting gift.
Then one day I awoke to the kiss of sunlight. That hand of
warmth that cascades from white ethereal clouds stretched thin across a
blinding blue sky. It touched me softly, through my thin mesh curtains and
carefully stroked my eyes, coaxing them open with a defiant oath; I will not
let you fester. So I followed its guiding reach, out into the world and away
from my tormented bed. Every step I took away from my cavern of depression shed
a further regret from my shoulders. ‘I should have begged her to stay’ left me
at the first step out my door. ‘I should have been kinder’, abandoned my mind
as I rounded the corner. ‘I could have changed’, was cast away at the first
lights in the junction by the park. With each step I lost a bar in the prison
of insecurity I had trapped myself within for months. The sun broke through the
darkened clouds her abandonment had forged and it shined upon me triumphant as
I ventured towards its source.
I watched children play by a glistening canal. Their
laughter dancing across the water. Playing the roles of mothers and fathers,
kings and queens, victims and murderers – unaware that all these things were
too adult for them to truly comprehend, unaware that one day they would be
forced to, unaware of the importance of their precious, ignorant youth. Too
eager to grow up. Too naïve to know what it meant. Ducks slid across the liquid
advance, chasing scraps – a violent selfish hunger destroying the calm of the
scene with every crumb that rippled the water. Through my squinted eyes I
caught a glimpse of white. A conditioned swish of a long swell of hair. I
gripped the edges of the metal bench on which I sat. My knuckles clicking with
the strain of my panic. Was it her? I felt myself sinking, the judge’s gavel
had struck and I was condemned back to my prison. But as the girl lifted her
head I saw her eyes weren't the ones that betrayed me, her lips not the ones
that had spoken my sentence. She was merely a phantom imitation of my demise.
I began to rise slowly from the bench. I was not free of
her, I never would be. No amount of sun could shine through her cruelty. I
sauntered past the canal in a desperate haze. The children’s laughs once so
melodic to me now stung me like nettles, whipped me like vines. The happiness
of others, such a dreadful reminder of the melancholia of oneself. I felt the
first specks of rain as I reached the junction, and as my skin accepted the
moisture, my mind accepted the anxiety. It flooded into me like a tsunami,
destroying every rational thought in its path. ‘She never really loved you’ –
my voice hissed at me as I ignored the ‘DO NOT WALK’ sign. ‘It’s because you let
yourself go’, was fed to me as I ran to the corner. I gorged on the venomous
words, unable to fill my nervous stomach sufficiently with their poison.
‘You’ll never be happy again.’ my head spoke these words as I reached my front
door. Shaking with defeat I fumbled for my keys. ‘You’ll never be happy again.’
It repeated, to reiterate the blow. I sunk down to my knees, a fighter knocked
out in the first round. And as the reality of the words sunk in, I got further
drenched in the dismal rain; unable to tell which drops were mine - and which
were her.
