Grounds For Divorce

There aren’t many people who become a widow by choice.

Walking out of my own house and into the street, the whiskey on my own breath only becoming apparent when it hits the fresh air, I realise that I need to suddenly remember the most basic of skills, and can’t.

The Green Cross Code, for example, escapes me. I walk out into oncoming traffic and check the wrong side of the road for cars. BMW’s scream to a smug, authoritative halt inches from me and garish, ugly words bellow out from an unwound window in an accent that’s distinctly arrogant with wealth. I flip them the finger – it’s the only dialogue twattish yuppies like that understand.

At one point I forget even how to walk, and then when my legs fall out of rhythm with each other, I stand in the middle of the street, terrified. It’s then that I also realise the following: I haven’t any idea how to interact with people anymore.

Children stare questionably up at me as their parents drag them away with one hand, and billow smoke through their own respiratory system with the other.

Old women I’ve never met before smile appreciatively at me and say hello.

A pack of awkward teenagers more or less sniff at my collar.

It all manages to cement me further to the floor. I’m suddenly a trophy of the community that created me, and I’ve no idea what they want from me in return.

Even my breaths aren’t correct. Deprogrammed, almost, each breath feels too contrived – too planned out – too systemised. My respiratory system feels like an enormous factory with just one, exhausted, incompetent man to operate it.

I get back to our house eventually. It’s not easy. My feet feel like hollowed out eyeballs. You can imagine walking on your eye sockets, can’t you baby? That’s how you saw your future, with your head bowed against the carpet as though in prayer.

The place is haunted now. Stinks with you.

Half eaten dinner on the table – a carrot, half gnawed like a spent offering to a reindeer at Christmas, some beef, more empty wine bottles than people. And you’re in the garden. Against the kitchen counter. Over the toilet bowl. Under the duvets. Over the duvets.

But, you don’t come anywhere near me.

I thought the bedroom would be a crime scene, at least. The disco lights of Police sirens - the fences of tape around the perimeter like a rosary of an aborted affair. But nothing. You were just another body. You weren’t a question mark. You were sentenced to death in self defence – they arrived in time to see the beautiful indigo imprints of your fingers round my throat – the almost holy handshake of the trachea.

Nice to meet you. Nice to worship at your alter. Amen Amen Amen.

They arrived in time for the scratches and gashes in that dry time between blooming and wilting (which is precisely when I took you). They weren’t present for the time previous when these wounds were itches. When they beckoned to you and you licked at them with silver and chrome. I loved that. Not many would, but I did. Absolutely I did. I cherished each little scarlet plume – you were in my pulse; my blood; my scar tissue; my scab. I thought you’d be eternal, just like the scars. But everything fades, or at the very least it finds a way of hiding within the unknown and unreachable.

At least, when you tied me up the other night, it felt solid and secure. The rope gripped me to the bed – it blistered my wrists. You left me for hours – a day may have passed. I pined for you like a young lover. My mind paraded with paranoia, and fear. My heart bleated fervently against my chest. It begged to beat against you, like it did when we first met. But you still came home and untied me eventually. And then I was just blistered, sticky, spent – free to leave. If you don’t pin a butterfly to the wall, it will escape.

It all got out of hand, I know. Goodbyes aren’t easy, and we both knew it was ours. I’ve never been much of a waver. I’d rather drown than wave. We reached our peak, baby. We were Kurt Cobain, James Dean, Edie Sedgwick – we bowed out at the right time, preserved ourselves.

We’d never need reach the unromantic depths of the law court, or the monotonous indignity of deciding who owned what CD’s, books and movies.

We wouldn’t have the awkward meetings. The what if, what happened, and remember when, conversations. We wouldn’t have the heartache of new partners. The heavy heartedness of careful treading parading new love through the streets and praying not to encounter the previous. We wouldn’t have the drunken phone calls. The desperate, innocuous sex of the broken - a tired, blotted jigsaw.

A funeral is the proper occasion to mourn its loss.

To be the last woman you loved.

The last thing you tasted.

The last scent.

The final moment.

I pressed my lips against yours and inhaled your last breath.

You would have done it to me, baby.

I just happened to do it first.