What I am talking about now is something from a long time ago.
This is how he left me.
There was a distance in him for a while before that morning when I woke up and found that he was gone. I remember the feel of it and I could sense it and it made me desperate and afraid and it made me cling to him. I could feel that driving him further away and I had no way to stop myself and I hated myself for it and hated what I was doing and the way I was with him but I couldn’t change. I held on tighter and tighter and I put my hands around his throat.
We could both feel something coming between us.
We skirted around it and it grew.
And then that one morning I woke up and there was a pale breeze in the room from the open window and he was gone.
And so then I did all those things that I thought would drown my mind and those things were the cold blank nights, the numb nights in unfamiliar houses staring at walls which were the walls of those men who I met in clubs and bars and who said you’re beautiful or some such inanity and I gave them all the same blank smile and it said take me home and my mind behind it said wake me up wake me up make me feel.
And often I sat alone on the beach in the night with the faint sounds of the city behind me, and drank whiskey and looked up at spinning sprays of stars above the white of breaking surf in darkness and beyond that the black open flat of the ocean reaching out and out.
Then all of a sudden Cal came back and a man died in an alley in the dark.