Blue skies from pain

My heart has never been strong. I pack another box, tape it shut, and wonder how I will ever survive this move. I check my phone: no messages. Of course there are no messages. I move through this complicated night alone, trying not to touch the strings. Strings of memory, strings of dreaming, strings of guilt and sorrow. Tripwires that will send me rattling down the narrow flight of stairs that I have descended and ascended so many times already. Watch your footing. Don’t touch the strings.

I listen to wallpaper music as I pack. Instrumental nothingness; music of the bardo. I learned that word from you. And now here we are — or rather, here I am. You are someplace else.

No messages. I put the phone in a kitchen cupboard, but I turn up the ringer volume just in case. I make a cup of tea. Your kettle, now. Not ours. Your op shop china set. I’m taking only what is truly mine, and not even all of that. Some things you need more than I do. Others are too delicate, or too heavy, or take up too much space.

I start another box. All of the awkward things that wouldn’t fit; that have been accumulating slowly in the corner of the room. I unpack and repack the same box three times; I can’t make it work. I can’t I can’t I can’t. I can’t fucking make it work.

Don’t touch the strings. For three years now you’ve been strangling yourself with tangled razor wires of anger and grief, and what am I supposed to do? How do you unravel somebody from that kind of pain? The only answer seems to be: cut them loose. Hope that it might save you both.

The tea’s gone cold; I drain the cup and bring it back to the kitchen. The window above the sink is still a square of black. I open the cupboard, to check the time. To check if anything beyond the hour has moved closer to the light. No messages.

Originally published in Reflex Fiction, October 2018