Fodschwazzle

You carry something dark. When you’re stirring a pot of boiling noodles, your fingers grip the wooden spoon so hard that you leave indentations. The water from the pot sloshes over the sides with your stirring, and the noodles stick together anyway—you just make circles with the spoon, staring at the wall behind your stove. When you dump the overcooked noodles into a strainer, you pour the boiling water over your fingers without flinching. Even when you add too much salt to the sauce, you stare at the floor and eat without acknowledging that you hate it, except that you throw the rest of the spaghetti away before it’s half eaten.

You barely answer the door when they knock anymore. If you do, you stare at their shoes instantly, as if them standing on your overly bright welcome mat was like the hazy film that grows over memories. Conversations are short, and you’re closing the door before they’ve ever really started. Well-wishing cakes and apologetic cookies grow mold in your fridge, though the cards went in the trash without being read.

At night when you twitch and kick the sheets from your sleeping body, you’re too much in the middle of nightmares to adjust them. You wake up in a sweat anyway. Only on nights when it rains do you sleep well, reminded of other presences like breathing and the tapping of toes on linoleum. Or maybe the rain sounds make you feel like you’re drowning.

Without him, you’re sinking into yourself like a splinter that gets pushed deeper when you try to pull it out.

There are no pictures left of him. The one on the mantelpiece that was a gift from his family is gone. The portrait fell and cracked on the tile around the fireplace. Did you cry at all for losing it? Yes, you cried because of the shattered glass, another loss in a life that felt always like another fragile thing, a dish or a personal bauble, was going to be smashed on the floor every day. The face you knew, next to your own in the picture, went into the trash first before you picked up a single glass shard.

You always preferred your rooms cold even as you shivered inside them. Where a shadow seemed to stalk you from one room to another, twisting your face into a relentless grimace, the sourness is gone now. Did you wear the grimace just for him?

It used to be his spaghetti and his fingers under the boiling water, when there wasn’t enough space to easily strain the noodles into the sink because you were busy glowering there with your arms crossed, spoon gripped in one hand so tightly that the wooden handle became indented by your fingers. Once, his jittery hands missed the strainer completely and dumped the whole batch of noodles into the sink, and because you weren’t looking a choice appeared: take the blame and cook a fresh batch or reach down and grab what noodles didn’t slide all the way into the drain. You were already mad that night, so ask yourself what option he chose.

When the dinner plate slid out of his fingers and shattered, it was like he had broken you. He was committing to your cycle of fragile things. Dinner was cancelled, and you laid down in bed like a plank until he could massage your fractured feelings back together. Sometimes this took hours.

With him, you sank into him like a splinter that you pushed deeper when he tried to pull it out.

At night when you twitched and kicked the sheets from your sleeping body, you woke up angry that he could be sleeping so soundly and cried loudly until your problem was his problem. Only on nights when it rained did you sleep well, though both of you were drowning.

That feeling was strongest on the morning he disappeared. A one-sided argument where he put too much salt in the scrambled eggs began, and he vanished. If it actually mattered to you where he went, you could have seen him fade into the walls of the house. He was so much backed into a corner by your need to examine every problem as if it reflected your whole life that he sank into the building itself. He became part of the place where you made him the worst thing to have ever happened to you and also the mutual recipient of all of your feelings, isolated just like you.

I’m still here. I see you now. I live in the walls and the bed and the mirror. I can see everything you do. It looks like you’re breaking over me, not reaching out for help to deal with the dark feelings you still have, but it’s not my problem. Your actions now were the same as before, but now you don’t have a target or outlet for them. You even spend less time crying over a shattered plate.

At last I can see that it wasn’t my fault that you wore that grimace in every room. At last I realize that I wasn’t the sole person responsible for your miseries.

I know I’ll escape from the walls soon. I can almost put a foot out now if I push. Something still needs to happen before I can stop living within the walls of this house. I still feel like I can be the warmth in your bed that tucks you in, even though I know that never gave you solace. You live inside me, but I never lived inside you.

One day I’ll pop out of the living room wall and walk through the dining room where you’re eating while staring at the floor. It won’t matter if you drop your fork and see me with your eyes welling with tears, I’ll keep walking until I’m out the door and driving down the road, away from your isolation and your fragile life.

You carry something dark, but I don’t need to be a case you store it in anymore.

_______

Week 1 of LJ Idol