Mind-fuck.
He paced only because he didn't know what else to do.
He ranged through the space of the apartment – the aimless, frantic prowling of the caged tiger. Lights were turned on and off again, windows opened and then repeatedly adjusted. The contours around him changed fitfully while his bare feet padded silently over the parquet floor.
His mind moved in different directions altogether; from roused thoughts to recriminations to 'maybe this is the essence of madness'. His lips formed unbidden words to coincide with the new darkness that had settled into his psyche - a blight on the landscape of carefully organised and neatly packaged thought.
When keys jangled in the lock, Caitlyn entered, returning from work and fighting with a heavy canvas bag of groceries. She found him lost and brooding on the couch, the TV on and silenced, and his expression fixed, undecipherable.
“Hi, lover”, she pronounced, setting the bag on the floor with a rattle of tins and the vague rustle of packages of vegetables. The side of the black canvas screamed in block print, 'This bag is Green'. She studied him and he seemed to wake to awareness of her presence. “Whatcha doin'?” He looked back at her but the window of his eyes showed that his substance was far away.
“Just thinkin'”, he answered, his voice devoid of emotion. She hung her fashionable black and white striped, spring jacket in the closet and nodded.
“OK”, she answered, accustomed to the odd turns of mood to which he was susceptible. She slipped off her flats onto the little carpet at the side of the door and then hefted the canvas bag from its repose on the floor, heading in the direction of the kitchen. “I hope you figure it out soon”, she added as an after-thought of encouragement and, then, rounding the corner, disappeared into the kitchen. There followed a sound of tins being set in cabinets but then a sudden, deafening and oppressive silence erupted. Thirty seconds later, she emerged, her movements stiff, from the kitchen. From the fingertips of her right hand, an opened sheet of creased, cream-coloured stationary dangled like something offensive or foul-smelling.
“Paul, what's this?” she demanded, her face a Sybil of multiple, simultaneously manifested emotions: anger tinged with jealousy, doubt, fear, mistrust and too many more to identify in their rapid cloud-shifts.
“It's a letter”, he answered and looked away. “I left it there for you to see”.
“Can I read it?”
“If you want to”, he answered vaguely.
The letter had arrived with the morning post like a premonition arising with sharp, back-lit, clarity of in the middle of the drab, mundanity of everyday existence. Flipping through the usual bills, coupon advertisements and unwanted invitations, it had lain, the recognised, lightly flourished handwriting having the effect of a curled viper, in his palm and he had the visceral reaction to drop the whole lot, in fear, to the floor. He had not done so but, instead, nodded pleasantly and smiled tersely to a known tenant who was also retrieving mail and, then moved with urgency to the elevator to return to the apartment. As the elevator rose higher, he felt the weight of the envelope growing greater as though its content deplored the altitude.
Caitlyn looked up from reading the page, her brow furled and her eyes showing inward turmoil and confusion.
“Why now?” she asked. Her voice was low and thick.
“I have no idea, Cat”, he answered. “I have no idea at all”.
“This is what set off your mood, wasn't it?”
He made no response, just tilted his head and shrugged a shoulder, acknowledging the obvious. Then, he mumbled cryptically, uttering a fragment of thought – a personal truth: “...nothing occurs in isolation”.
Caitlyn knew the whole story; Sophia's sudden and mysterious disappearance, taking the, then, 18 month old Anne, with her and Paul's frantic attempts over the following years to find his erratic, unsettled wife and beloved daughter. It had nearly destroyed him mentally and physically. The letter, now, from her, only served to tear open suppurating wounds that had been carefully stitched closed and tended until the veneer of regrowth and normalcy had appeared.
Caitlyn crossed the floor and knelt before the couch. Paul, huddled against the cushions with his legs tucked under him, seemed to shy away from her advance. She rested her hand on his shin and noticed the dull, yellow glow of the wedding band on her finger.
“What can she want now? What is the purpose of this confession... and declaration?”
“I wish I knew”, he answered, hollow. Caitlyn sighed heavily.
“Paul, you still love her, don't you?”
“It was another time, Cat. I miss our daughter. She'd be five and a half now”.
“I know”, she answered, but her own feelings were drawn as tight as harp strings.
“I miss what was supposed to be”, he pronounced, honestly, and shaking with the electric flux of the past. Caitlyn took a deep breath and then spoke slowly.
“Paul, I love you now. You are my husband”. Paul nodded. “I know I came along after Sophia... that I'm your second choice...”.
“No, Caitlyn, that's not right...”.
“But it is, Paul”, she asserted. “I know it and you know it, too. But I'm not going to let these ghosts from the past, that we've worked so hard to vanquish, destroy us in the here and now... I won't”. Her truth and her will power were a brave and compact legion against a Spartan horde.
They embraced, tightly.
Outside, in the fading, evening light, a child squealed in delight for the sight of a bounding squirrel and, in the confines of the apartment, the lengthening shadows were history and memory and the past that never fades.
thanks for visiting.
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