"There's an art to leaving, a perfection, a symmetry"
Here's how you leave: you sit, you cry, you call a million people you haven't spoken to in months. You want someone to say the right thing, and you don't know what it is, but you know you haven't heard it, so when the words dry up, you go quiet. You live off caffeine and nicotine for three days, and when you try and swallow soup you gag it up again. You skip yoga because you're too dizzy - you can't not smoke for a whole 90 minutes - and you spend the morning, instead, with the Repo Man. You tell him you'll come back tomorrow. You're lying. You cry a little more, you call the ex and talk for three hours and say 'I love you' more times than you ever said it in two years of fights and punches. Your dog sits at the end of the bed and starts to whimper when the case comes out because he's seen it before, and he knows what it means. You have one pile for taking, one for storage, one for charity. You take the jeans that you bought two years ago, wore once, place them in each separate pile at least three times, change your mind, hand them to your roommate. You scour the internet for evidence that everyone else is more successful, less single, less crazy, just as confused as you. You wallow a little in the sting of being reliably, perpetually a wild card, the only prediction that anyone can make about you being that at some point, at some time, you'll pack and leave in the night, a few broken pieces scattered behind. You pile the bags in the car, you call some people to take the furniture which you inherited from the last person, you go round to Jules' and you sit and laugh and laugh and laugh with people you don't know, drinking coffee well into the night, your dog cuddling up close because he wants to smell you and feel you for as long as he can, because he knows it'll be a while until the next time. Some guy you've seen distantly, the hipster who works in the coffee shop, kisses you, trails off with a hug that you can't tell is for you or for him. He kisses you again, and it tastes of coffee and Parliaments, and it seems appropriate, a little sad.
You leave and you don't say goodbye to many people, and you stop checking your email and your facebook and all that bullshit, because there's no one you want to talk to, and you don't have anything left to say. You kind of wish you hadn't spent so much time working-working-working, because you forgot to feel a little too, see-smell-touch and there won't be California, not for a while, not when you've skipped out on the debt and in four weeks time the angry letters will start arriving to an address which is no longer yours.
You don't really know where you're going, but you know where you have to be, so until then you just let things slide a little, hope the money people sent you is enough.
You buy a pack of cigarettes and a coffee. The bottom of your trousers are wet because it hasn't stopped raining. The Uggs are melch and mildew. You can see Christmas trees in people's houses, blurred by rain. You don't know what you feel. You don't particularly care.
You leave and you don't say goodbye to many people, and you stop checking your email and your facebook and all that bullshit, because there's no one you want to talk to, and you don't have anything left to say. You kind of wish you hadn't spent so much time working-working-working, because you forgot to feel a little too, see-smell-touch and there won't be California, not for a while, not when you've skipped out on the debt and in four weeks time the angry letters will start arriving to an address which is no longer yours.
You don't really know where you're going, but you know where you have to be, so until then you just let things slide a little, hope the money people sent you is enough.
You buy a pack of cigarettes and a coffee. The bottom of your trousers are wet because it hasn't stopped raining. The Uggs are melch and mildew. You can see Christmas trees in people's houses, blurred by rain. You don't know what you feel. You don't particularly care.
MIMI IN NY | 3:15 AM |
