Gwyneth

All of the furniture is white. She pushed for that when they bought the house. White walls, white armchairs, white candles lined up like soldiers above a white fire place, the red-yellow flames billowing in the reflection of the white mirror. She stares at them wide eyed and unblinking until the tiny fires merge into one undulating mass. It is dancing. She wonders if she ever will again.
She is folded in half on the sofa, the curtains pulled shut across the windows. London will mind its business and stay outside today, no matter how hard it knocks on the glass.
For the first time since moving here she feels like a foreigner. The city is an alien and she is an alien. She thinks about home but doesn’t know where it is. She doesn’t belong anywhere anymore. All that existed is disappearing, a distant echo of a song slowly fading into the ether. She tries to hum the tune but can’t; even memories grow hazy.  
She dips an apple slice into a jar of peanut butter and wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. There are lines there that weren’t there yesterday. Goodbye already drawn across her face, a diary entry that can’t be expunged. She rubs at them anyway, for a second or two. She has never taken no for an answer.
Until now that is.
Until him.   

There is a plate of spaghetti in the fridge, she has just remembered, and she is silly-hungry all of a sudden. But the kitchen is down the hall and down the hall is another country. She unfurls her legs and lets the blood rush down into her feet. Her head is a little thick from the sudden moving and it dawns on her that she has been here, in this white room that was painted once with all the colours of a happy marriage, since last night. Upstairs felt holy, she supposed. A mausoleum of their happiness that had been sealed shut, and she didn’t have the strength or the faith for any of it. She grew more and more languid as the March sun dipped out of the sky, more listless, more alone.

And then it was night, and now all of sudden it was day. The world kept turning despite her own coming to a crashing halt.
Things begin and things end, she tells herself. She has been here before. She would be sad. It would hurt. And then it would be fine. She would pick herself up, brush through her hair, face them all once again and it would be fine. Really.
He would fade like everything else. Become somebody she knew once. Somebody that she poured herself inside until everything had gone. Simply a man she had shared her life with, until that life was nothing but a memory, a song she couldn’t quite remember the words to.

Jared Leto

I have crawled in my sleep somehow so that now half of my body is on his, my left side draped over his left side and my head and hand on his chest. There is a light from somewhere that paints the outline of his face onto the pillow, his hair like reeds in white water, our bed the ocean.
The sheets have tangled between us both and we have become tied together in a human knot that strangles us. I can feel the push and pull from him, his wanting to be here and then his wanting to be anywhere else.  
The tide comes in and the tide goes out.
In the blackness of our room I feel his tears pool in the palm of my hand.
He is drowning.
I pretend I don’t know.

It is tomorrow and outdoors has bled through the window and our room is sticky and golden and it is spring and it feels like winter. He is at the end of our bed in a chair covered in orange flowers that I think are daisies. I want to tell him how to be here but I don’t know. Sometimes you just are and the love is enough.
Sometimes it is everything.  

I climb out of our bed and my body is heavy as wet sand and I feel his eyes on my neck as I make my way to the door. The light shivers and I turn back towards the window.
There is a moment when I look at him and he looks at me and the tide comes rushing in and we are wading again through water that is all at once both familiar and startlingly new.
And then it is still. And he is still. And so is the light. And I am all that is moving; moving towards the chair covered in orange flowers that I think are daisies. Every step I take is a step to be closer to where he is. Always.
I sit across his lap and rest my forehead on his and my hands are half circles over his ears.
He is here and I am here, weary together in a room that is sometimes filled with water.
He cries into my mouth and I eat his grief until it is gone.
It is all either of us can do.

I am a rock

I want to come to dinner and am too aware that I cannot climb over from where I sit, in the middle of it all, and climb into a car and change my plans and turn up with wine and hello's and I didn't plan on coming but here I am's.

I am too aware that I am not the person I thought adults were when I wasn't one.

All that I am is bone deep and carved into cartilage like cave drawings. I am meticulous and ordered. I am a train schedule that runs ten minutes behind but runs and stops anyway. First there and then to there and then some other place on a track scrawled in pencil onto a clock that is ticking and is always ticking.

I am a clock and my feet are the seconds and I am responsible for the world not falling from where it is.

I am a fool that knows better.

I am an idiot that knows no better at all, wide eyed and waiting.
Almost always waiting, steady and still as a lake somewhere on the outskirts of a past that is already too far away.
You are a boat. Onwards and out, out you go, frothing foam white tracks into the water and clapping like an engine.

You are a plane.

You will be there, sighing your yesterdays into your past, and holding tight around everybody's wrists as they float about you in the air; making sure they don't disappear altogether, into the sky.