-We are complex creatures.

Shadows envelop us, so that the space the light touches is empty. We are dark outlines. She sits on the edge of the bed. Her thigh tenses causing the mattress to quiver. The smoke swirls around us. The only thing that joins us. There is a silence now. The buzz of the electric current feeding the lamp is a muffled hum. The bed has felt every movement and echoed it along its springs. It is still now. We are silent. But not a word has passed between us since we entered the room. Only the clinking of ice, the sound of spirits flowing from the bottle, and the other unintelligible sounds of two people attempting to connect, and that muffled hum.

She pulls on her stockings. I watch her figure, as she balances and moves in and out of the light. It is beautiful in a way. The bedsheets still drunk on her eau, effuse fragrance. It’s haunting, the same way autumnal breezes bring back ghosts as they scatter leaves. I wince. There are too many moments between then and here. Too many which if erased could tip the scale of memory and transform the moment. They are there buried. But they are the kind of moments which obstinately refuse to hide and manage to unearth enough of their jagged edges to remind you there was blood, sometimes by causing you to bleed again.

It could be the light, the smoke, the fragrance, the bleeding. Her figure changes. In the shifting shadows I follow its length, the effect of light becoming caught in the pattern of her stockings. The way the shadows embrace everything else her. She leans back. Her body fills with breath, deeply. Then she deflates, her shoulders slump. Without looking back, she gets up and grabs her garments from the chair by the window. She stands there and stares at the space, as if the curtains were pulled back. Her body fills with breath. The smoke has dissipated. Nothing holds us together. I look away. As the light shifts her form, whatever was familiar is gone. Years before there was nothing I wanted more than the familiar.

I grab at the dark, gathering my clothes. I shift in the bed and pull them on. I have an odd sense that another edge will refuse burial. I lay back. She’s still standing by the window, still staring. She’s parted the curtain. She’s dressed. She’s still breathing deeply, still attempting to recall how we ended here. She’s in between all those silences we’ve long since forgotten about. Attempting to figure out how the only sounds between us became unintelligible. I feel I should reach out and pull her towards me, perhaps an embrace would change the silence. But my heart’s not in it, and neither is hers. So we both just remain there. Her, searching through what we’ve forgotten. Me, trying to not remember.

Then I get up and walk away. If I had never at least thought I loved her I might have stayed. She would have never left before me.

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