1

I woke up in a panic, a nagging feeling that there was somewhere I was supposed to be and something I was supposed to be doing. Sliding off my bed I tried to collect myself and refocus. I’d slept way longer than I intended. The apartment was already dark; illuminated by whatever residual light managed to seep through the window and the flickering screen of the tv as another predictable sitcom went through the paces of its opening credits. With a cheerful song and smiling faces it tempted to come and seek shelter in its self-contained world. The pulsing light spread itself around the room, working it’s way up to the corners of the ceiling and around the overwrought crown molding, where it lost the battle to the encroaching night. I was supposed to be working but considered letting myself be distracted when my phone rang. John, I saw before swiping my finger across the screen to answer. Hello?

Hey man, what are you up to tonight?

Just trying to get some work done, I answered, hoping that was actually true.

Well a bunch of us are going out tonight, you should come along.

I looked around my apartment, weighed my laziness, loneliness, and wallet and decided I needed to get out.

Sure, I’ll be there. Usual place? It was so usual I didn’t even really have to ask, it was understood at this point that if we were drinking, that was where we’d be doing it.

You know it. See you there.

Like the sitcom streaming into my apartment, here was another world inviting me to participate. I felt it clearly when I walked into the bar. I saw John in our usual booth in the corner. Drink in hand he waived me over as I paused and looked around the room. I recognized most of the faces but felt no particular emotion towards them. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about them, but when I looked around I saw only a field of impenetrable fronts. A series of masks carefully composed. Everyone was trying to keep in touch with everyone else just enough. Just enough so that if they needed them as a contact later, they wouldn’t feel bad about calling them up. I didn’t see any real care. I didn’t see any fun in this. This was business. This was work, networking, that vague term that always called to mind synapses firing electrical impulses at each other and carried over miles and miles through fiber optic cables. I stood smiling just like everyone else, nodding my head and laughing, being swept up in the conversation and forgetting for a moment or two that it was all a game, that everyone else was playing and not caring. Was I the only one slipping up? Did everyone else keep their guard, keep their objective to the very end? I doubted most of us really knew what game we were playing, really knew what we were trying to do. We kept it from ourselves, that made it so much easier to deal with. If we admitted it was all a facade, all just a game we played, how could we keep going on? Why would we care? What were we making money for anyways? To build the biggest house, with a nice pool? For the loft apartment with an extra bedroom? To put food on the table for our families? None of us were living for ourselves, we were all living for someone else’s memory, some memory that had been created for us. Some dream that we were taught to pursue when we were kids and believe it was our own. And when we reached that dream, looked around and found it lacking, we were presented with another, told this dream was only to get to that dream, but always there was another dream. It kept us running, kept us trying. Kept us in this room sipping slowly warming beers and exchanging subtly slanted niceties. Kept us trying to catch the eye of the girl at the corner of the bar. Kept her from looking back.

Into this reality stepped another. The very way she walked seem to expose the whole sham of our existence, seemed to mock our conversations, our posing, our fabricated dreams and decaying memories. It wasn’t in anything she said or did. She had no sense of it herself. As far as she could see she was just like everyone else. Nevertheless her rhythm was different, the cadence of her body a little lighter as though she had her own, unique inner sense of time. Like a light shined from a new angle, her being exposed cracks previously hidden. The ugly scars that we complacently overlooked became impossible to ignore. She cut straight through everything without wanting or trying. Her glance said she knew, she understood. Her smile was not fake. There was feeling behind it. There was caring. It drew people into its warmth, lulled them to sleep and awoke that unknown feeling that lay dormant within each of us without us ever knowing why or what it was. Beautiful she was, but it wasn’t her physical presence that made her beautiful. It was her knowing. It was her eyes. In the moment they caught me I saw myself reflected in her knowledge, saw my place completely and fully in the world, from every possible angle, every past, and every future. A brief glimpse into a deep world of experience that had been hidden from me.

I walked over to her, with a compulsive fake smile still plastered to my face and cursing myself for it. But there was no recrimination in her eyes, only understanding and compassion as she returned my smile and held out her hand. The room was disintegrating. Whatever held it together, held these people together had ceased to be. For it never was in the first place, and to undo what never was was such an easy thing no matter how hard it often seemed. They all drifted off on their own, each into their own world, and mine contained her.

The rain was pouring down, running through our coats like paper towels and soaking us to the bone as we ran maniacally down the street. With all my effort I waved the tiny umbrella in front of us, trying my best to shield her from the drops and failing miserably. The wind whipped us back and forth across the sidewalk as we laughed their way down the street, clinging to each other and desperately seeking shelter behind our little shield. We stumbled our way to the door, hiding beneath the tiny awning as she reached into her bag for her keys. Cigarettes, gum, charger, tampon, poured out as she clawed through her bag again and again. A few cigarettes fell to the ground, quickly carried away by streams of water as she burrowed deeper still into her bag. I could feel the moment slipping away, the story I had composed in my head was falling apart and giving way to reality. I pulled her to me, trying to hold on to that fleeting here and now, but still I felt the cold water on my back, the dampness in my socks, the reality of the moment chasing away the fantasy. With a look of relief and excitement she pulled out the keys. Two clicks and we were inside, two more and she was on the counter.

2

The more I tried, the more I began to feel as though a piece was missing within me. I tried to put myself into that life I imagined, and even there I didn’t fit. I wondered if this was really how everyone else around me felt. Whether they simply refused to admit, pushed it down so deep that they could barely hear it as a whisper. A whisper they drowned in the discordant music of the everyday. No matter how much they fought it they must all still hear it as I hear it. Perhaps not as loud, and perhaps they chose to ignore it, but I had to believe that it was still there. Anyways it doesn’t matter what they hear, only what I hear. Only what I feel I have to do. So I put my head down and focused on the screen in front of me. I tried again and again to get to work, to produce something, to conjure it up out of the digital nothingness, but it refused. I needed a break. My whole life was just one big break strung together attempting to achieve some sort of cohesion.

There’s something I want to talk to you about.

What’s that, I asked, my eyes still focused on the screen in front of me.

I think we should break up.

I paused, what’s that, I repeated stupidly, hoping to buy some time while my brain caught up to hers.

I said I think we should break up. I can’t stand this anymore.

Can’t stand what? I thought everything was going well.

No Adam, it’s not going at all. I can’t sit here any more doing nothing.

Well how come you never said anything before? This is the first I’m hearing of any problem.

Of course it’s the first you’re hearing it, because you never pay attention to anything. Hell, it’s been the underlying message of practically everything I’ve said for the past three months. You just haven’t been listening. That’s the problem Adam.

I was pretty sure I had been listening, and I certainly hadn’t heard any of this before. If it was the underlying message of everything she had said then it was lying deep under. Why couldn’t she just say what the fuck she meant, then I could have fixed the problem. Of course I didn’t say any of this. I don’t want you to leave, you’re everything to me. I wasn’t sure if this last part was true, but it seemed to come out naturally so I went with it. It was how I imagined people expressed themselves.

No Adam, I’m just waiting here for you for when you get bored. We’re living side by side, but we aren’t living together, and I just don’t see the point anymore.

Well whats wrong with side by side, if we’re happy with it? I’m happy with it. Just tell me what you need. I started to feel that something I didn’t understand was happening. Things were changing, tipping over that point from which there is no return. The unspoken was rising to the surface and breaking the silent complacency of our small corner of life.

Well I’m not happy, I want more, and I know that I’ll never get it here. You’ll always be special to me, but I have to move on.

And there it was. It felt like someone had just ripped my heart down through my stomach while twisting my spine. I searched for words but came up empty, my mouth moving up and down, the words trying to find their way out had taken a wrong turn, gotten lost, and lodged themselves in my esophagus. The room was closing in, my vision was narrowing, I couldn’t even see her sitting on the bed anymore. I had to get out. I can’t be here, I managed to get out. She let out a deep sigh as I headed for the door. Another disappointment, I supposed, as I practically ran out the front door into the cool night air.

I had enough of my mind together to remember to check my pocket for my keys as I stepped outside into the light rain. The street lights cast a gentle glow over the sidewalk. The few people actually up at this hour were protecting themselves under umbrellas, no doubt heading home to the warmth of their houses, maybe to boyfriends, girlfriends, flatmates, families. I looked left, then right, trying to decide which seemed more appealing at the moment. It didn’t matter, I just needed to go somewhere, I turned left and started walking towards the corner store. I found my gaze sinking down as I pulled more and more into my own thoughts and made a conscious effort to take in the street I was walking down. A street was never the same when you saw it at four in the morning. No one was meant to see it at this hour. It was like watching someone when they’re asleep. There is no pretending, no pose, no effort, no attempt. There is only the street being, quietly, and me walking alongside it. Each store was enclosed in its own steel cage, as though the owners wanted to make sure they didn’t run away in the middle of the night, to find some open land and freedom to do as they wished. The only light besides the street lights was the sign of the corner store, bathing the intersection with tidings of sandwiches and beer, the temple of late night snacks and last minute impulse purchases. I wasn’t hungry so I kept walking.

When I returned she was already gone. The apartment seemed to be incomplete without her clothes strewn about to balance out my own carefully calculated disorder. There was a strange, uncomfortable stillness lying heavily over everything. I turned on the tv. The soothing, mindless stream of self-absorption and advertising washed over me, lulling my mind into a trance, waking sleep without the burden of creating my own dreams. I felt my thoughts becoming those of the tv, thoughts that did not belong to me forcing their way in and out and expressing themselves in my head, taking over my own thoughts until I couldn’t tell the difference, couldn’t draw the line between them. I sat down and let the day ease away as my mind slipped into a collective conscious carefully crafted from market research. I felt myself slipping in and out of the roles that had been created for me, felt myself identifying with the characters just as I was meant to. Felt the brief, weak catharsis when everything came together at the end and the the main character learned their small, but practical, lesson about family life or caring about friends or following their dreams. It was satisfying only because it was what I wasn’t. It filled some void, if only for a moment. There was some reason why I needed to hear those trite situations played out again and again. Every time I knew what was going to happen in the end, but I decided to see it through anyways. Maybe this time it would be different.