That winter, they met time after time after time, but nothing got said. They met when she came to pick up the last of her things. They met to sign all the papers, to plan the funeral, and then when she finally signed the apartment over to him. Each time they wanted to say something, and each time they didn’t.
It wasn’t until autumn came that he visited the grave. He chose a shirt, put on his blazer and the trousers he only wore on special occasions. He looked at himself in the mirror for a long time, and hated himself for it. He was nervous, and there was no reason for that.
He waited in the car, in the car park. Then by the gates, the stone wall by the entrance. And he waited on the path, stopped along the way, waited and looked ahead as though he was thinking that maybe she would be standing there after all, smiling at him and saying hello. He waited and waited and in the end he’d waited all the way to her grave.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but no one heard.
And then he moved his lips and maybe, maybe he said that it sounded like a good idea at the time, but he was drowned out by the silence, by the raindrops hitting the leaves around him, hammering like restless fingernails on a table.
The stone was shiny and polished and bore her name. They had engraved two dates, which should have been further apart, but nothing was as it should have been. In front of the stone, someone had raked the gravel into soft lines, maybe her mother, maybe someone else, it didn’t make any difference. Sara had ceased to exist.
Like the numbers when a circuit board is switched off, like the sound of a bird when it has stopped singing. Replaced by silence.
A little life.