I picture her sometimes still. She’s always behind an open window, my view of her obstructed by a flowing white curtain, like the ones she bought and always meant to hem so we could hang them. Sometimes she’s alone. Usually she’s with the silhouette of someone that isn’t me. He’s taller, with a full beard. He cares about composting and he likes running as much as she does; upcoming marathons already in his calendar, no nagging required. Picture of domesticity. All tea towels and coffee cups. The scene is white and shiny and glazed over, just like a movie. She’s laughing, sweet and thick, like caramel. She washes dishes. That’s all she’s ever doing – just washing dishes. Sometimes alone, sometimes with him. Over and over and over that’s what I see, in shop windows and in the bathtub and in every woman with blonde hair. I see it when I smell her perfume, though its scent is lost on me after all this time and now I think most women’s perfumes would remind me of her. 

Even now, I feel as though I know her so well. I feel, I believe, that I could predict her every move, that she must also be thinking of me whenever I’m thinking of her. My heart doesn’t like to work independently, so used to our little routine, to the subtleties of her voice, the way she’d raise her eyebrows or purse her lips. So used to reading her mind. Of course, turns out I wasn’t as good at that as I thought, in the end. 

She’s not always there, though. I’ve always been good at blocking things out. Getting on with it. I get up, I shower, I go to work, come home, go out or stay in, watch telly. The tricky part is the train in and out. Having to sit still, trying and usually failing to focus on a podcast. Head buzzing, heart ticking. Wondering if she’ll get on the next stop, even though she lives nowhere near here and would have no need to. But who knows? The brain invents. She stayed at a friend’s house somewhere else. She’s going into town to pick something up. We catch up. She laughs. She tells me she misses me, she’d love to go for coffee. And then… 

And then? 

It’s not like I want to get back together, necessarily. Though, sometimes I do think that would be the easiest thing. It would stop all this pain. All the fucking crying. Drinking would be fun again. Train journeys less exhausting. But then I think of it seriously. Of trying to look her in the eyes to find happiness in there. It had been so long since that happened, even before she left, I can barely piece together what it looked like. How the lines on her face shifted, how everything softened as we read each other, left to right like a book. It’s all blurry. All hidden behind a white curtain. 

And I tell myself it’s better. And it is, in a way. The freedom. No one I have to call to say I’ll be out late. No nagging conscience telling me she’s waiting, she’s anxious, probably crying by now. No argument the next day. Just a raging headache and sometimes a girl that smells a bit like her. Bacon and eggs – I can eat real bacon again, no eco-warriors allowed in my new flat. I’ve considered making a sign.

I call it “new,” but of course it isn’t really. Not unless you count ten months and a renewed lease as “new.” But if you didn’t know any of that you would think I had just moved in. I still haven’t bought another set of sheets, though I always mean to. It’s not so bad, though, now I’ve no one telling me I need to wash them every week. The walls bother me. They’re pale yellow, and still bare. They’re haunting when I stare at them too long, but whenever I consider digging into the wardrobe to find my old music posters I feel a chasm open up in the pit of my stomach and my throat starts to close up, so I think I’ll do it next week, when I’m not so tired, maybe. Mam gave me a plant when I moved in. It sat on my window sill, dead, for about two months before I threw it out. I considered keeping the pot – it was nice, ceramic – but the thought of cleaning it out and finding a new plant for it and keeping the thing alive… I just threw out the whole thing. It’s not like I ever have Mam over anyway. 

So the days go on like this. And nothing changes. Sometimes I think maybe a conversation is what I need. I haven’t seen her since we finished packing up the apartment. I just keep hoping to run into her, to see her soften again. To hear concern in her voice, to make her laugh. Be reminded of the shape of her teeth, the exact shade of blue-green in her eyes. It’s all slipping, away, away, away. Behind a curtain that blows faster and faster in the blizzard between us. I think if we spoke, maybe she could give me what I need. Like she’s been holding on to me this whole time and I need to beg her, in person, to let me go. Please, for the love of Christ, let me go. But time has shut that door over and over and over and I am on one side of it and she another. Sometimes I check to see if I can still recite her number. But I never dial it. 

They say it’ll only be shit for a while, and I know that, in theory. I’m waiting to wake up and feel renewed, or to meet someone new, or something. But I just wake up tired, older, heavier. I can’t remember what it felt like before her, so I think it must have been like this then, too. I think it must be like this forever. I think we must all be miserable if we’re not in love. And eventually, even when we are. I think we must only be happy when we are young, when everything is new and alcohol is light and freeing and love is exciting and the future is full of everything, and I am not twenty seven and living alone and gaining weight, and she is not a dream laughing behind a curtain, but a woman who loves me, a woman I hold at night and am still holding in the morning, a woman who would never leave me because she is happiest with me. 

But now it is today and she is gone. In the morning I’ll get up and I’ll shower and I’ll listen to podcasts and I’ll go to work. And the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that. Maybe something will change, one day. But until then, it goes on like this, because it has to. Because I don’t have any other choice but to let it go on.

 

WORDS: Caitlin Power Parnell