Something mundane

You stayed up all night to pack but left the floor for me to mop. I thought I was just here to take you to the airport but you made me help you clear out your apartment. It took a whole hour and an half in which time the hazard lights had drained the battery in my car, and once your bags and half your life were loaded it refused to start. There was a frantic rush while everyone ran around asking for jumper cables, but all I did was curse. When the car whirred back to life wearily your friend Mike held me close and, though not licensed to drive, advised me to keep the car running to charge the battery so that I wouldn't get stranded at the airport with you. I drove like a madman through the busy traffic faster than I had ever driven this piece of trash, all the while trying to elbow your bags out of my field of vision, but you just laughed. I parked at the curb and left the engine running, but the security guard told me not to leave the car unattended or he would arrest me. So I flashed my toothiest smile and put on the dumb blonde shtick, and ran inside with you to the terminal with your oversized bags holding your ordered life. I hugged you for a brief second and said, I’ll miss you, but you had to be contrary and said, I already do, and snapped a quick photograph. No time for long goodbyes when my engine is running whilst illegally parked and posing a threat to national security.

You never really understood what I went through, no matter how much I tried to explain it with my rubbish words, but you always listened and had somewhat intelligent things to say. I say 'somewhat' because sometimes all I needed was for you to say, you’re torturing yourself, and I would say, fuck you, and we would laugh. I needed your dogged pragmatism to keep me grounded, when all I wanted to do was walk in dreams and words, and write. You made me get out of my apartment with your French-Canadian accent screaming in my ear to get my sorry arse to the courtyard, the coffee shop, even the library. We ridiculed my therapist's opinion that it was dangerous to me but you must have been secretly scheming to make me stop the writing, the thing you both thought would destroy me. I hated you for it at times, but it was good, I guess, I might otherwise not have been still here. But then again you never understood it meant letting a part of me die.

And then you had to leave, didn’t you, now, just when a gaping black hole decides to suck me headfirst and backwards faster than I could ever drive in the other direction, igniting the burning words and scorching phrases bubbling in my head haunting, taunting, threatening to overwhelm all my senses, to implode deep in my guts, until I am repeating them endlessly under my breath. They are coming out of the woodworks, from nowhere I can see, and everywhere I can remember. You had to leave now, just as I have an urgent itch to describe the entire world and my suddenly altered dreamscape, to compensate for all those times of hiding behind the blank. Look where I am now, look at this. I'm writing again, very reluctantly. All it needed was for my car to refuse to start. What am I to do? You're no longer here to stop me. I can only promise to confine myself to mundanities.

So ... thank you for your message at four in the morning to let me know you had arrived. I would have said fuck you if I had picked up.

Mundanities, for now. My car probably won't start tomorrow.