Sketching Out The Numbness

Slip, and keep slipping.

“What is this?” he says.

You can fall a thousand times, a thousand ways, but it doesn’t make any difference. You’ve still fallen. You’ve still failed.

“What is this?” he says, and taps his fingernail against the glass.

He knows what it is, it doesn’t need explaining. It’s her, falling; it’s her, drowning; it’s her, unable to stop.

And he has no room to talk. She has seen him sink a bottle of wine. She has been there when he has drunk pints enough to bring most men to their knees. She’s matched him. And now he comes with his “What is this?”

“You know what it is,” she says.

His eyes slide away and they sit. She stares at the glass in front of her, at the table it sits on. He looks at his own thoughts, turned away from her.

There’s something broken here. There’s something hollow and yawning that both of them know can’t be filled. She’s like the sea; she feels it. She looks down into herself and can’t see bottom. There’s only green and black and purple stretching deeper than can be understood.

She slips and keeps slipping.

She looks up, because she thought his eyes were on her, but she must have waited just too long. He’s looking away again, seeing something hidden in the distance; hidden from her, barely visible to him. She looks at him and sees all she ever will. Lost boy, blanking himself off because the world doesn’t hold him; filling himself with knowledge and facts and theories. She sees a man, who holds so much of her that she wants to understand but is afraid to ask for; a man who is looking away.

The sun is coming up, and she stirs.

“I’d better go,” she says. It feels like she’s been saying that for hours.

He moves to the phone and calls a cab. There is no goodbye; she simply leaves with the dawn, crossing over into morning and beyond him.

Fair promises were made at one point during this night of slipping. Fair promises that both know will never be kept, and the telephone rings while she is still in the cab, and the message is left that confirms it. Fair promises that are broken so quickly.

For all the comfort she would like, he delivers introspection. A quiet numbness, like foam sprayed over a fire, that sits and stops the oxygen from penetrating. This quiet numbness sits and covers over all the rage that she could unleash, if she were ready to fall completely.

She leaves the cab on the corner. She doesn’t want to be dropped outside her house. She prefers to walk the last few yards. It is starting to rain. The drops are fat and warm and they mix with the drops that fall down her cheeks, splashing together onto the ground as she walks. She is the sea and could flood the world with the tears she contains.

Her tears are deep and green and salty and they fill the street. Cars float off. Litter floats off. She keeps walking until she reaches her house and the waters subside. She will not drown the world today.

She slips, though, and keeps slipping.

The phone call confirms, and she hangs up with a sigh. In a week that voice will be lost forever. She knows.

She makes a phone call of her own and starts the process that will slip her under, like she has been slipped under before. No bottle this time, but a blister pack of small white pills, named for the days of the week that she will ignore when she comes to pop them through the foil. One at a time, a day followed by a day, followed by a day, but in reverse. Trying to work backwards to a point when – what? He was not the thing she wanted? Or the point before some other he crashed in and took her essence away?

She slips and keeps on slipping, like a pebble skimmed across the surface of a lake, that loses momentum and starts to sink. She slips into her own green depths. Green and purple and black like the sea. Never ending, no beginning; a point that stretches beyond where the eye can see.

He sits on, after she is gone, and looks towards that point. He carries everything of her, and he looks at his own thoughts. She is slipping, and he knows it. She is falling to that point, and now he looks away.

For everything and nothing, he has sat here at this table. For everything and nothing, she has fallen and been broken. She takes up her pen and begins to write him, without knowing. He sits and looks at his own thoughts.

They slip, and keep on slipping, and her pen carves him out in purple-black against the page. She is writing him without knowing, sketching out in words the numbness that he brings.

The cat is worrying around the television stand, so she lays down her pen to look. She kneels, she lies almost flat against the floor; she looks beneath the tv stand and sees a huddle of brown fur, pink ears and twitching nose.

“Poor mousey,” she says, and pulls away the stand to see the tiny panting thing with half its tail missing.

The cat sits by and watches.

He sits at his table and watches.

She scoops the mouse into the dustpan and carries it out of the house and into the back alleyway. She puts the mouse down on the ground, on a pile of gravel, and it doesn’t move, it just pants and blinks and twitches. It will be dead before the day is even halfway begun.

She turns her back on it and goes back into the house.

She turns her back on him and the pieces of her he holds. She slips into the numbness.

© J R Hargreaves 2006