In the morning, I found a note nestled on the bedside table between last night’s water and a lamp whose moss-greenness, in the bright daylight, nauseated me. The effect of the note was worse still. ‘Gone to gym. See yourself out,’ it read, in scrawled letters, followed by a hastily drawn ‘x’ which joined in a loop at the bottom as though it were, I thought, a wise, descending fish keen to distance itself from its creator’s superior cold-bloodedness. I’d been a fool to think things would be different – he had proved himself incapable, after all, of emotion beyond perfunctory gestures, or, with Herculean effort, fairly convincing eleventh-hour pleas for forgiveness. He wouldn’t hear from me again.
I gathered up and climbed into the rest of my clothes, and found myself in a strange position. His apartment was beautiful, no doubt, and it irked me to think that he had planned to return from his day to a place seemingly untouched by another human being (apart from the maid, who he would find easy enough to displace from his thoughts). Life as normal – no mess, no consequences. Childishly, I considered taking his shirts from the wardrobe and throwing them in colourful plumes from the balcony; a rippling, rainbow cliché for the neighbours to enjoy. But I didn’t have the proclivity for wastefulness that would have entailed, and seeing the destruction in the muddy street below would have wounded him less than it would me. Even so, the spectacle occupied my thoughts for a few long minutes as I pawed through the garments, drinking in the finery as much as delaying an inevitably prosaic exit on the precipice of vandalism. Keep the shirts, I thought at last before turning to the door, buoyed up by the thought of how little they could do, for all their fineness, to improve upon a hopelessly defective character.
tragicomicalwiththetruth 