When the alarm went off in the morning the left side of the bed was cold. She knew this even without having to roll over, the lack of tension in the blankets, the soft sound of her breath as the only source of noise in the room. But then again, she’d been the only one in the bed before the lights went out. He hadn’t even bothered going to bed.
Slowly, she pulled herself up, joints snapping, hair trailing down into her eyes as she rubbed the sleep out of them. The blankets were twisted and the faint light of morning was just beginning to creep through the curtains across the small window, painting the room a delicate shade of blue. She smiled weakly. When they had first bought the apartment, she’d tried to get his opinion on things, it was going to be a shared space, a combination of the two of them. In the end she’d given up, slamming doors in frustration, the sound of the keyboard echoing late into the night as he ignored her. She was so used to the sound of his typing that she didn’t even notice it anymore.
She found him in the living room, abandoned cups of coffee in a small circle on the coffee table, stacks of notebooks wobbling precariously next to the half-eaten bagel on a dinner plate, his laptop resting on his knees as he lay sunken back into the couch, eyes closed and snoring softly as his glasses threatened to slide down his nose.
She gently removed his glasses, careful not to wake him, stacked up the dishes and slowly began her march to the kitchen. The empty jam jar was resting unwashed next to the stove, the remains of dinner caught in the sink trap and slowly the sense of unrealistic panic began to grown on her. This had happened before, it would happen again. She was tired of trying to compete when there was no chance. Even after all those years it was still impossible for her to compete against poetry.
She left the dishes in the sink unwashed. The sound of her feet echoed through the hallway as she padded across the floor. And when she came in front of the mirror, she could no longer recognize herself. The angles of her face had changed, the weight of her breasts more pronounced, her hair flatter and her stomach carried a different type of roundness that it hadn’t before. She was no longer the skinny college girl she’d been when they’d first met, impressionable, ready to take on the world, feeling confident enough to move on from the preppy boys she’d dated in high school to men who had an actually opinion on politics, who read poetry and were against the system. Whatever that meant. All she knew is that half way through her second semester she’d met him. By the end of the summer they’d moved in together, two struggling writers who together couldn’t even make a decent part time wage. Six months together turned into a year, then two and three. She’d dropped out of college, stopped writing, gotten a job to pay the rent, cooked dinner when she got home after work and found him on the couch writing.
He was still writing after all these years. Only now he was no longer writing for her.
The front door closed quietly behind her, a force of habit. He’d started yelling at her if she’d done something that could have made him loose his train of through. So now she closed the doors quietly, vacuumed when he was out at poetry readings, and watched TV on the computer with headphones so he wouldn’t hear any background noise. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d called her his muse, like when they’d first been dating, just a bitch when she distorted the creative energy of the house by opening the pantry door too quickly.
The apartment was on the top of the fifth floor, there was no elevator because that meant the rent was cheaper. She washed laundry in the bathtub because the washer had broken shortly after they’d moved in and hung her clothes up to dry on the rusting balcony rails because the building manager had never bothered to install a dryer. She couldn’t complain through, rent was cheap. Especially since his advances barely covered half of the food bill.
The stairs creaked under her weight as she carefully made her way down, making sure to avoid the rails and the three steps about a quarter of the way down that she’d nearly fallen through last week. The wind was teasing the curls of her hair, still damp from her shower and she could smell the sun rising over the clouds as the city began to slowly grind to life. She pulled a hair elastic from her pocket and tied her hair back before it reverted back to its original state as a bird’s nest. She glanced back up at the apartment, paint peeling off the door, the crack in the window and him asleep on the couch inside. Today, she would go to work, buy groceries after her shift was over, come home, change out of her work uniform and make dinner. Maybe tonight he would eat it, rather than stumbling through the door with MacDonalds in his hands. Maybe tonight he would join her in bed, or at least leave a love poem on her pillow, scribbled on a sheet he’d torn out of one of his notebooks. She gripped the railing tighter, tears threatening to spill. Who the fuck was she kidding? The poetry had ended just before they moved in together, the declarations of love and the sex had followed shortly after.
There was a crack as the railing detached itself from the steps, the staircase starting to sway violently towards the building next to it. With a small scream her left foot slipped out from under her and she slid all the way down to street level, startling the flock of pigeons eating breakfast in the alley.
Heart thudding, she levered herself into standing position so she could assess the damage. The stairs were curved at an awkward angle, almost attempting to give the building on the other side of the alley a hug and the pigeons were cooing loudly in protest of her interruption of their breakfast. Her uniform was ripped at a jagged angle along the side of her ribs, a large chunk of her hair was caught two stories up in the railing, her knees were bloody and now she was late for work. The staircase was the only way back up to the apartment as well.
Laughing, she slowly lowered herself back onto the ground, scattering the pigeons at her feet as the laughter turned into sobs. She phone buzzed at her hip but she ignored it, curled into a ball and cried until she couldn’t breathe any longer. When she was done, she slowly raised her head. The alley was empty, the staircase still broken. She pulled herself up onto her feet, took one last look at the apartment and began to run.
The saleslady’s smile turned into a frown even before she was completely through the door. The walls were lined with various types of footwear, fashionable footwear that would cost her their food budget for the week. “Can I help you?” asked the saleslady, her smile stuck somewhere between a grimace and a sneer in desperation to make a sale. The store was trapped in a back corner of a side street and it was a miracle that it was even open on a Sunday.
“I’m looking for breakup boots,” she said, smiling widely. The saleslady blinked and pointed her towards the back wall. Slowly she made her way to the back of the store and grabbed the first pair of boots she saw, knee high black boots with red shoelaces. She hadn’t bought a new pair of shoes since high school, unable to justify the cost when she couldn’t wear then to work.
He would have laughed at her choice, claiming that no one outside of middle school wears red shoelaces, he also would have yelled at her for the price. He would have claimed that she didn’t understand him, that writing was delicate, that it took time, energy and very specific pieces of your soul that you bargained in exchange of the right twist of words in a sentence. That it was hard for him, why couldn’t she understand that? He would have quoted Rilke to her, forgetting that she was the one who’d introduced him to The Sonnets of Orpheus, had covered his eyes with her hands and whispered the poems in his ears to better showcase the heartbreaking impact it contained. He would have told her he loved her, if he remembered to, without even a hint of poetry in the words.
But he was still sleeping, she hoped, trapped in their apartment on the fifth floor until the staircase got fixed. Which would take a while due to the fact that the manager wasn’t due back from vacation for another two weeks. The saleslady rang the boots through the till, her frown deepening as she paid in cash, counting out coins till the very last cent. Smiling broadly she left, ignoring the fact that the saleslady didn’t even acknowledge her leaving. The heels of her boots echoed on the cement of the sidewalk, the laces making small clicking noises as they swayed while she walked, the bloodstains from her knees were partly covered up by the height of the boots and the side of her shirt was tied together in a knot to hide the rip.
There was no hurry though. She still had plenty of time before the mall closed.
