Night Like This
He didn’t want to go out on such a night, but the bills must be paid. There was no reason really that he could justify calling in to his boss, especially being so new to the job. There would be too much he would have to admit, too much he would have to reveal, and he just couldn’t do it, not yet.
But there he was, in the silence of his apartment, emptied of the voice that had catered to him for so many years. Nothing, just silence. The red digital numbers of the clock next to the lamp in his living room told him he only had an hour. An hour to get ready, to pretend none of it had happened, and get on with life. There was nothing he could do now, no one available to salvage what was gone, no one, but the one who was gone.
He didn’t know how long he had been sitting there. He supposed at some point during the commotion his eye had caught sight of the time, of those damn numbers counting away his moments of self-accumulation, of trying to bring himself together in time. In time for what? For his night shift cleaning the mall after all the spoiled teenie-boppers had thrown away their parents’ money? Did he really need this job?
Of course. The show must go on. He must go on. The second hands tick on his watch. That was still there at least. There was still that, he supposed. Was it out of forgetfulness or irony that it was left behind? It didn’t matter. It was still there, and he would be damned if he didn’t wear it tonight, on such a night.
With the militant seconds of the way-ward watch, he managed to force himself from the couch. He could do this. He could go on. He swayed his hips to the side, avoiding the table that was no longer there. It had been taken too. As had the chairs. In fact, it had all been taken in a mad rush. How she had managed to put it together so quickly, to assemble the disassembling of his life in one morning with such speed, was a slip in humanity when he had so painstakingly tried to be humane.
He had only told her this morning, unable to keep the shakiness from his tone, the saliva in his mouth as he made the words he had practiced over and over in the mirror depart from his face. He had spent weeks agonizing over whether it was appropriate to take her hand in his, to put an arm around her to comfort her. They had spent so many of their adult years in unity, tying ends together in the situations they could build in this down-beating world they were forced into. But they had done more than make ends meet. They had woven strands together to make ends become middles.
Or so he had thought.
She didn’t want his hands around hers when he reached for it. She shifted her shoulder away when he reached to touch it, and slapped him square across the face when he tried again to put his hand on her knee in an effort to sooth her silence. After the shrill of the slap in the apartment coupled with the world revolving outside their walls, she stood, pulling her knee-length skirt down, as if her knees were just too revealing.
After all that had happened, all that would happen, he loved those knees. He loved the hands patting the fabric of the skirt, and the flow of the cardigan, and the swish of the ponytail. He loved it all. He loved her. But just not in a way which he could continue. Not in the way she needed.
What she needed she acquired with speed, an army of friends—man friends he had never seen before—sneering as they passed him, though as wordless toward him as she. They accumulated her things—his and her things that she now claimed—and shoveled them into the back of a sea-foam green Chevy. She was among the last of their load, and with them in their sleeveless shirts and red bandannas, she paid no attention to his pleas for understanding, made no effort to hear.
She was gone.
Their—his—apartment ached with the absence, and the guilt within him tore through his pores which drank in the conditioned air, dehydrated by his tears and anguished sweat.
He moved to the bedroom, the bed sheets stripped from their form, hangers trailing from the open closet, the dresser gone entirely. The television remained, but the Blu-ray player was absent, along with the curtains, though she had been kind enough to leave the towel hanging from the bathroom door, whose light was still on.
Mere hours it was from sitting with her on the sofa to the emptiness of their home.
She was going to leave any way, he realized. Already she knew, or if not, at least she herself was unhappy, and already on her way out before he knew the door was open. He felt the cold now, harsh against his dampened skin. Had she already known the words he needed so deeply to push out? Or had she just given up? Which was worse?
He drew himself to the mirror in the bathroom, their picture still stuck to the side of it from their vacation, with straw tropical hats and sun-scorched faces turned toward each other in ironic duck-face. His focus fixated to the mirror. He had practiced telling her so many times, so many hundreds of times, now he needed to remind himself as his eyes welled up with tears.
He breathed in, pushing her memory away, and bringing to mind only his hopes for the future. His lips parted, sticky, and his tongue tried to moisten them.
“I—”
A sob. Too much, too much too soon.
“I—”
He tried again, clearing his throat. He was running out of time. His whole world perspective demanding constructive displacement in just forty-five minutes, needing to be in place so that he could move forward.
“I,” he inhaled, ready to expel all his being into his following words. “am gay.”
The tears filled his eyes, and were flowing, but a part of him felt stronger. He tried again. “I am gay.” There it was again, the piece of him that had felt deranged, cracked and broken, fastening itself together. The reflection in the mirror changed as the tears altered their note. “I am gay,” he said again. His face was struggling with itself, muscles contorting as the pull came from his eyes.
“I am gay, and I make no apologies to myself or anyone else,” he said at last, this time, his reflection smiled through its red, damp face, and said it back.
© 2017 by N. J. Thompson, Nicola Thompson, & AuthorNJThompson. All rights reserved.
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