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.