“fuck”, she said quietly, answering a question that was still lingering in the air, like an infinitely sustained echo between the bare walls of my apartment. The very same apartment we had spent two days packing away into banana boxes, binliners and the boxes we picked up from the local supermarket at one of our midnight shopping runs.
Over the past couple of hours, we had been sitting half facing each other. Me on a huge stack of magazines (nearly every issue of Rolling Stone magazine back to the mid 80s, collected meticulously from the local magazine shop, ebay, and every rummage sale there was in a 10 mile radius. If only I could get a hold of the september 1998 and the january 2001 editions), and her on the Doghouse - a contraption I had built not six months earlier, designed to hold the television and our not insubstantial DVD collection.
The doghouse, like my faith in her, was creaking suspiciously as she moved slightly. In my mind, I could see her break it, and impale herself on one of the dividing walls. Just like I had seen her set herself alight at the stove. Just like I had seen a gang of murderers batter her to death with cricket bats. Just like I had seen her - time and time again - unconscious, bloody, and maimed, through the windshield of that ridiculous little VW Lupo of hers.
I guess it was safe to say that things weren’t going too well. Hence all our boxes being labeled “my stuff”, with a quick R underneath. Or a T, if it was hers.
The silence wasn’t as much deafening as numbing to all the other senses. The everlasting smell of her cigarettes and Slim-Fast drinks had faded over the past 10 minutes. Even though the sun was coming up, the colours in the room were faded, like a photo that had been stuck on the dashboard of a car for twenty years. The reds - faded. The blues - gone. Only the greens and yellows remaining. Envy. Fear. Pale green and pale yellow.
I never really even knew what happened. She woke me up one morning a few weeks ago. In my masochistic revelry, I had not denied any of her allegations of cheating, lying, and stealing. Although none of them could have been further from the truth, I felt as if every single one of them were well-deserved. I guess I was just in one of those moods.
It happens every single time I fall in love with someone. I find myself waiting for it to fall apart. I revel in the accusations. I want them to get angry. To punch me, and to really dig their heels in.
Of course, Tanya would never hit me. She never even raised her voice. Not properly. Not with any passion. Perhaps that was the whole problem. our lack of passion was overwhelming in more ways than one. She never had any interest in life. And - no matter how much I tried - I could never muster any interest in anything, never mind life itself.
The hard echo of my last words, spoken as I collapsed like a bag of week-old cantaloupe seeds onto my magazines, hit me once again, just before she spoke. “So. it appears we are at the end of the road. What do we do now?”.
It seemed to come in a full circle. End it all the way it began. Probably the only poetic thing that ever happened to us.
Strangely satisfying, though.