Journey

There are scratches on her skin that she can’t explain. Marks around her ankle on her right leg, nowhere else. They sting in the heat of the water from the shower. That’s how she finds them. She thinks she’s being bitten, and when she looks she sees the scratches. Skin flaking away from one, leaving behind a shocking pink weal.

He sleeps, face down where she left him. His arse rises in the air slightly, like a baby’s. Naked and abandoned, closed off and unaware of anything around him, she lets him sleep while she showers away the smell of him and what they did last night.

Her stomach turns and she has to quit the shower. Just soon enough, the contents of her stomach fall out in a curdled line of red wine, burrito and half digested weed. She looks at it for a while, waiting to see if there is more still to come. There isn’t, so she flushes and returns to the heat of the water from the shower that stings the ruptures in her skin and pounds away the smell of him.

These days are running together again and it’s only the words printed on the back of the blister pack that are keeping her aware again. She sat for hours in a park downtown yesterday waiting for words to come. She wrote and she re-wrote in her black and red notebook, the same words over, but nothing real came.

It was the book in this bathroom that reminded her of why. The same book as one she had seen on the floor of another bathroom more than a thousand miles away in a life she has almost forgotten about.

She wraps herself in towels and dries her hair roughly. Through her open doorway, across the hall to his, she sees him prone on his bed. Imagining is no substitute for the reality of vision, and no amount of daydreams could have conjured up the mixture of vulnerability and ridiculousness that lies there on the bed across the hallway from her.

She closes her door and begins to dress. She dries her hair under the hot blast of air from the dryer. Machinery that helps her tell lies about herself. Heat and air movement that straightens out the waves and kinks of individuality. She doesn’t look at her reflection in the mirror until the last possible moment.

Two eyes that looked and in their blankness reflected back the fury that she had in hers. The exactitude of hate. He was too high to understand; too high to know the dance she was leading on. Pushed back beyond the touch of humanity, raised away from things that hurt, the intimacy of strangers and friends treated as equally unwelcome. He reflected back her fury because his own fury was buried too deeply. Lost and raging looked at lost and numb and so the connection was made.

She stands in this borrowed room behind the closed wooden door painted dark chocolate brown. She waits on the stripped wood floor for time to pass and make itself clear. She remembers in pieces, slotting them together, the way he had looked at her, the trick he had of disappearing.

No chess game, this. His eyes different from those other eyes. Her eyes angry, but not with him. Her stomach churns.

She wants to write but the words don’t come. She can’t settle. They won’t be forced. The thought that keeps repeating is not the kernel of her tale; it’s a blind, a false start, a distraction from the truth.

She aches from the bruise of him; the bruise of both of them. One physical, felt only because the emotional bruise from the other got there first. She tried to rip herself apart to let him out, but found him already gone and her empty and raging, staring down into the shuttered, mirrored corridor of this replacement’s soul. Imagination no substitute for the reality of vision.

Face framed with dark brown hair that follows lines dictated by machinery and heated air, she finishes dressing and leaves the challenge of the borrowed room across the hallway from the shivering scenes of memory; kisses in darkness, whispered names and commands; the fear of discovery and the longing for release; neither one realised by the one doing the wishing.

She boils water, brews tea, makes toast; the sound of traffic from the morning street accompanies her. Thud-purr of rubber against asphalt gives the rhythm; bass-line from the apartment upstairs; melody yet to be determined.

She stands with her back to the room and feels him behind her, in the doorway. She doesn’t turn; he doesn’t speak. She can’t guess how long he stands there; all she can do is imagine the pose, familiar from the days already spent in his company, and when she turns around finally to look, he isn’t there and the click of the door confirms his departure.

She fills her belly with food and with fluids. Juice, water, tea and soda. Buttered toast and aspirin. The world slows down sometimes and changes direction. Days ago, it seems, not just one day, not just yesterday, she had wanted to kill her a thousand times over. The punishment for success, the reward of misery. Waiting seemed the best way to achieve it. Sitting on a bench in a foreign park, waiting for the words to come that would tell the story of how she felt. Sitting in a kitchen with a strange cold flame in her belly; staring into eyes that simply existed to bounce back how she felt.

Today, hushed into silence, the house and her aching, skin-broken body know that the essence of defeat is the same as the essence of triumph. You can’t fight what there’s no chance of overcoming; it’s like tilting at windmills, calling them giants. The certainty of madness is indefensible, because the certainty is false. Like an oyster that refuses to give up its pearl; like the grain of sand that becomes trapped and builds its lustre; like the piece of rock or glass that is worn away by the sea; there is always an earlier cause for the stubbornness of now.

She runs errands. She thinks, as she walks and feels the bruising between her thighs, of the taste and the shape of him. Clean and smooth. Inoffensive and remote. The warmth of a body that wasn’t really there. Everything she needed wrapped up in that moment of nothing. Reaching out to take from the special offer bin the smoking gun already set off by someone else and no danger to her.

They encounter each other as she returns to the apartment building, both holding keys in their hands. They look directly at each other and in the moments it takes for the elevator to carry them two floors the hand of unfinished business is dealt.

Polite words in the kitchen as she boils more water and brews more tea. He reheats coffee in the microwave. Carefully moving around each other, close enough to touch but gently avoiding the acknowledgement of presence. He eats leftover pizza while she sits at the small kitchen table, square and tiled white and glossy with birch wood legs and frame. She sips at the hot tea, wanting nothing, set free by the feel of him in her hand, in her mouth, against her body; set free by the memory of it.

The time comes for her to leave, packing her meagre belongings into her bag in the silence of the borrowed room. She doesn’t ask for a number and he doesn’t offer one or ask for hers. He used her name in the darkness of his room and that was tag enough.

She smiles. She has been smiling since she woke to the silence of the house. Endorphins conspire to set the body and the mind at ease, regardless of their source. She walks from the borrowed room along the hallway and through the living room. She has the feeling that she has cracked the weary spine of everything. Anticipation no longer glues her to the spot. The scene is there for her to flee, set up that way from the start. They stand awkwardly in the kitchen for a moment. He mutters something, furtive in his fear of getting caught, and she smiles more widely. Hands brush and she pulls him into an embrace that lasts and doesn’t exist but becomes the necessary rite that will remove her from the kitchen without any of the usual results.

Riding the train across town, she is caught smiling by another woman who recognises the nature of the curve of her lips and smiles her own secret pleasure across the train. She won’t be complicit with the other woman’s imaginings, though, so she looks away. Her smile has nothing of the romantic attached and she doesn’t want for there to be any misconstruction of its meaning. For the rest of the journey, she feels the woman looking at her, wanting to smile her way again, but when she eventually looks up to check, the woman is gone; left the train at some stop in the past to carry her secret thoughts with her through the remainder of the day.

People are rushing as she leaves the subway and waits for the over-full elevator to deliver her safely to the skytrain.

Her head is tired of travel, and through lack of sleep. The muscles in her shoulders ache where he pinned her down and leaned against her frame. Her senses are alive to who she is and what will never again be. The sky has turned dark during her journey underground and she watches the lights twinkling around the airport, and the cars hurrying to terminals to set down or pick up.

It’s a toy town universe with its own rules and ways of behaving. Strangers become close friends with just a glance for as long as it takes to get safely from A to B. Advice is given, humanity shared. She wraps herself in blankets of indifference and glides through the surrounding bustle of life and all its journeys, concentrated in this one place.

© J R Hargreaves November 2006