November 14 - Remember an afternoon

They kissed goodbye on the day that they broke up, because after five years of kissing goodbye, it wouldn’t have felt normal not to do so. Perhaps it was a way to say, no hard feelings, thanks for the sex, thanks for five years. She watched him board his train and waved goodbye with no rancor or ill will, and watched his frown deepen as the door dinged to a close in front of his face. She didn’t wonder whether or not he had found a seat, or whether he was comfortable; whether he chose to read a book or to listen to music on the departure. Instead, she wiped abashedly at the moisture that had accumulated in the corner of one eye before anyone could really say it had been there at all, squared her shoulders, turned her back, and walked from the station.

He did not listen to music, nor did he open the book that lay unread past page three in his luggage, nor did he even just stare out the window and admire (or ignore) the landscape that went by. Instead he wrote her a letter. It was about everything she had ever meant to him and everything she always would. He remembered that afternoon. The way the sunlight glinted on your hair that day we took the boat around on the lake in the summer, he wrote. I thought to myself that nothing on earth had ever looked so beautiful. He scratched it out, embarrassed, even though only his eyes had seen this profession yet, but he kept writing sentences like this, couldn’t stop himself even as the train chugged along and increased the distance from their starting point.

He wrote for hours, wrote until his hand cramped, because he was writing the old-fashioned way, on lined paper that he had in his luggage, not on his computer, as though the laptop was too stale and impersonal for these deep words. When his train reached his destination, four hours later, he regarded with satisfaction what he had written. His first stop, he thought, would be a stationary store, then the post office, where he would tie it all up in ribbon and put it in a fancy envelope, and mail it using a decorative stamp.

We have left her, meanwhile, squaring her shoulders and boldly leaving the train platform. My entire life has been in preparation for this, she decided, wiping away the beginning of a tear before it could crystallize. She was excited by the time she made it to the car.

She drove, using the directions on her GPS device. Turn right in One. Point. Three. Miles, intoned the robotic voice, and she obeyed. She loved driving down new roads, on which she’d never before explored, even though she was only a few towns over from where she had lived for the past twelve years. Nervous knots of anticipation tightened in her belly as she neared her destination.

It was the botanical garden, laid out over fifty lusciously landscaped acres, and she had come because it was an attraction listed in the area, and she had decided it was her duty as a citizen to make the most of the world in which she lived. If it was deemed an attraction, she would be there. Had he hated this pastime of hers, the way it ate into her afternoons, their afternoons together? She had forgotten these sentences by the time her car puttered to a halt and she exited into the parking lot, gravel crunching beneath her sneakers. After all, it was a warm, early summer day, mid-afternoon on a Wednesday, and the sun kissed her nose and the breeze was just right, and the sky a washed-out blue. Most of the people she saw, at this afternoon hour on a week-day, were elderly couples, almost always walking with the woman’s arm looped through the man’s as though they were entering church solemnly on a Sunday morning, or perhaps attending a wedding, or perhaps it was a funeral. So she saw elderly couples and she saw mothers – always the mothers, she noted with a frown – out with their children, but they always came in pairs, these mothers, pushing their strollers and lowering their voices, their heads wilting towards one another like fading daisies so they could gossip, while the children ran ahead, and the mothers talked about twenty-something secretaries and other motherly fears, and they liked that here they could talk without really having to pay attention to the children because they didn’t worry that the flower beds would abduct their offspring.

I am intoxicated by the beauty here, she told herself, walking among these mothers and geriatrics, inhaling a dozen different perfumed blossoms as she strolled the main path, detouring to observe the trees in the “forest” with respectful silence, and cooing over the tiny bonsai trees in the greenhouse, and making a foray into the rose garden which had just burst into all its glorious yellow-orange-red-pink-magenta-maroon-crimson glory. She winked at the roses and moved on.

She went out of her way, walking to the far extremity of the botanical garden, because the map in her hand told her the lilacs were in bloom and were a “must see.” By the time she arrived, her feet were blistered and her nose reddened from the sun, and the mothers with their strollers and their broods didn’t bother to come this far, just the intrepid elderly couples, who suddenly looked awfully happy and smug in their longevity. She stared at the clustered purple flowers of the lilacs, lavender dust mops, they looked like, and she stifled a gag.

“I don’t even like lilacs,” she muttered, her eyes going wide at the realization. She hated that cloying, thick smell and always had. She limped back to her car.

Meanwhile, he has gone about his errands at the stationer’s and the post office, and we have left off with him here, thinking the night would be endless. He walked slowly, his feet dragging, towards the stolid, constant presence f the mailbox on the corner from his home, the same one he had walked by every day he had lived in this city for twelve years now (every day except weekends, when he had traveled to visit her, fostering their long-distance love). “Guess I get to see you on Saturdays now,” he told the mailbox wistfully, and lifted a hand to pull open the drawer and deposit the beribboned (and perfumed, he was ashamed to admit; he had added a spritz of cologne) envelope.

“Hey!” called a voice, staying his hand. He turned to see his co-worker waving, running the last few paces towards him, a gait made awkward by her high heels. She stopped at his side. “So funny seeing you here! The girls and I were just going out for a drink. You’ll join us?” He looked back over his shoulder at the mailbox, still just patiently waiting for him, but his co-worker was already tugging at his arm and he let himself be tugged. He tucked the envelope under his other arm and assumed tomorrow was good enough. He drank five glasses of foamy beer at the outdoor beer garden with his co-workers, and by the time he stumbled home at three in the morning he realized he’d left the package behind on the wooden bench of one of the communal table. Something about this should have bothered him, but his brain felt as fizzy as the face wash he scrubbed on his cheeks – metrosexual stuff from the drug store, he acknowledged with guilt, but he liked the way it smelled – so he decided to forget about it until the reason he should care mattered more in the morning, and he let himself flop onto bed and fall asleep with his clothes still on.

She sat awake for hours. She had thought she’d be so busy – remember all those afternoons she had swatted him away, declaring, “You’re getting in the way of all of my projects!” How her body had cringed at his approaching footstep, if she was in the middle of a good book, or about to dive into another escapade about town seeing the “attractions” listed in her home city. How delightful the idea of a full free night – of hundreds more free nights to come – now seemed, as the GPS guided her home from the botanical garden. She cooked dinner, and she popped open a bottle of wine with a smart sound, like poppers going off on New Year’s Eve, and she relished her solo party and put on the jazz music that he hated and she adored, and remember that afternoon by the lake where he had refused to let her play her favorite records. She unbuttoned her blouse and she half-cooked, half-danced around her kitchen.

By the time she finished dinner – not so good, after all, she thought, with a sour twist to her lips – the meat undercooked, the potatoes lumpy, the green beans not fresh – she frowned at the label on her wine bottle with consternation. ‘I don’t even like Spanish wine!” she said bitterly, but the wine bottle didn’t look ashamed of itself.

She surveyed her apartment and already it looked awfully big for one person, and the books on her shelf looked like awfully quick reads, and boring ones at that, and she couldn’t quite remember why it was that the night alone had seemed like such an intoxicating proposition. She flopped onto her bed and lay there staring up at the ceiling, hoping the respite of sleep might come.