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-The smoke dissipates into the air. The window is open. He didn’t notice until she left. The cold. He stares out at the city lights; somehow they look a little different now. A little less magical, perhaps. There’s an ironic smile on his face and he lights up another one. To keep warm. He would follow her, and she might come back, but he understands, and he doesn’t. He feels, a certain, weariness set in, and his eyelids weigh.
He takes one last hit off his cigarette and as he exhales, it feels as if his energy leaves with the smoke. He puts the cigarette out and pushes himself off the chair and drags himself to the bedroom, but he doesn’t lie on the bed. Instead, he rests on the floor, pulling down one of the pillows and closing his eyes.
It’s not long before his quiet snore fills the room. It’s one of the things that perhaps made her nights in that apartment a little less pleasant. He’s been working on it, trying to muffle the sound in his pillows. But now, he sleeps with just one, on the cold carpet. There are dreams, but the kind he won’t remember when he wakes. And he sleeps, in fading memory, perhaps possibility.
The night’s cold is displaced by the morning’s light spilling through the window. It rouses him, but it’s not obtrusive, he fell asleep behind the bed and it shields him. Where he lies, the light bounces off into different angles and misses his quietly shaded spot. His eyes open, still sleep laden. And he is conscious, but that morning consciousness, which is still a few leaps away from full consciousness. It’s in this half sleep that he stumbles off to the bathroom. With the door’s closing, he catches a breeze that shakes him into greater consciousness and he struggles with a smile in the pale morning. A new day.
He brushes his teeth and stares at himself in the mirror, wondering about life’s progression. I’ve done pretty well. He forces a smile for himself. He’s aware that sometimes, no matter how well you’ve done, you still lose. He’s seen it often enough through his experience. There were little things that helped him through in those moments. He used to keep a box filled with letters, notes and cards he had received. Encouragement, appreciation, from family and friends, mostly friends. He threw that away, not too long ago. Putting away the past. Sometimes we don’t move on, until we let go of what came before.
Now he has himself and what he’s learned to get him through. No more reading through old notes that make him nostalgic. She never gave him any of those artifacts to hold onto, she just left a great many memories, and they’ll come up, but he’s grown very accustomed to dealing with those. It shouldn’t be a problem, he thinks, she’ll always be there, for a while at least.
It’s not until he’s done, studying himself and brushing his teeth that he steps back out into the quiet room. He notices something on the bed. From the way the light bounces off the comforter, it may very well just be a shadow, but it’s kind of an odd shape for a shadow. As he approaches it, he can begin to distinguish the edges and the fold. It’s paper, folded into a shape with three corners. He half smiles. Three was her favorite number.
He picks it up and slowly unfolds it. He reads, pronouncing only some of the words, reading the rest silently.
“There……too……not……Forward……standing…..Know……care……I…….myself……Bye…”
He laughs, uncomfortably, it feels awkward, to leave and leave a note behind. Still, he can’t resist and he brings it up to his nose. The scent of her still lingers on it. Perhaps the oils in her hand as she creased it. Maybe the pen fell out of her hand and ran down the length of the sheet, leaving her impression sewn into her words. And he laughs, because if he doesn’t it may be too real and he may never leave that note and that room. Some of the old in the new, some of what he needs to get through. He held onto that box for too long and it’ll be days before he can put this one away.
But for now, all the boxes are gone from his life; it’s the contents that still linger, for a while anyways.