09.03.09
I could’ve done anything, so I did
I woke up. It was morning. The sink was running. He’d be back in five minutes. I only had five minutes.
What could I have done with only five?
I could’ve thought everything through again. I could’ve talked myself back into my mindset: leaving. I could’ve reinvented myself a thousand times over, shedding mental skins one after a-foolish-nother. I could’ve paid my bills. I could’ve written the one letter I really should’ve written, which was to extend my writer’s grant. Instead, I put on a sweater, a pair of jeans, and my brown shoes, forgetting socks, an undershirt, and underwear. With two-and-a-half minutes, I left him a three word note on a torn page:
“Good-bye, my heart.”
and I left. With the remaining time, I wondered if “good-bye” was really four words. Anything that difficult to say must be more than one word. One word took seven years for me to say, five-and-a-quarter of which were spent building it from scraps, the only pieces left after his every insult, every bit of backhanded flattery, and every redeeming moment. Every one of his warm, tender, and kind heartbeats swayed me.
Who are you after seven years? “Couples grow together,” his friend told me. Maybe we exchanged parts, like blows or kisses. I still had my brain, though he thought it was his. My lungs, though, he had. I realised this when I saw the five minutes at the sink were gone. In place of the watch I wore only to bed, I saw him bent over the note, surrounded by inevitable gloom and the things we bought together. “I’d like to demonise him,” I thought, but he was everyone, just doing his best in spite of his issues. He just stopped growing with me. I waited. I hung around for a couple years before I started smoking. That made years feel like nothing. Soon after, I forgot about growing until three minutes of my five minutes were gone and I somehow found a brownstone doorstep.
Couples stop growing, like everyone.
I thought about taking the words back. Three or four could just be misunderstood: “No, what I meant was that I was going out and you might not have been here when I got back. ‘Good-bye for now’, y’know? And the heart bit was like what those internet kids do, that less-than-three thing. I was just being overtly literal.”
“Where are your socks?”
He could always tell when I was serious because my handwriting was impossibly small and these three or four words were incredibly tiny. Nuclear physicists would marvel at their tiny, still particles. Anything I said was always written because he would always otherwise bowl me over. There was never enough time for my words, like the no I wanted to say when he talked about me walking down an aisle with all of our friends and family watching, smiling … thinking we won.
Where would I go now? Who would I see? It’s been forever since I was allowed to talk.
Or was it? Did I choose to submit, to surrender? To give up? Who was to blame? Did that even matter? Could I even dissect seven years fairly?
We lost. That was all.
My feet started to sweat. I felt for my phone, one of those movements that you learn to do, like checking for your keys, but I realised I had neither my phone or keys. I was beyond everyone. It was liberating and terrifying. I could’ve done anything. I did.
I took off the watch. I wasn’t in bed, so I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. The sun was coming up. It was the first time I noticed time. I went to the river and watched the sun climbing across it. I thought about meeting it halfway. I wondered if I’d bother swimming.
But as the sun rose, I rose. I rose to meet it even if I stood at average height. Things wouldn’t be so bad as long as I kept my choices. As long as I had choices, I could be and somewhere, maybe behind me, I heard something say that I had to make a choice. I think it was me.
So I did.
Here I go.