Drifter
Nancy came home for the funeral and decided to stay even though she knew her mother didn’t need or particularly want her there. Mom had been “living a different life as your father” for years now and she didn’t see his death as much of a disruption and made it clear a daughter’s presence wasn’t going to be either. “He never got me,” her mother told her, which broke her heart as she had watched her Dad try to “get” his wife for her entire life, but she was a moving target of which he could never hit the center. or anywhere in the scoring rings most days.
She went back to the city twice, the first to end things with her boyfriend. It wasn’t really a break up as they had been drifting apart for a while. He hadn’t traveled with her to the funeral and when she walked into the apartment on her return, she noticed he had already packed a few boxes. The easiness of the split made her more sad than the actuality of it.
“I saw it coming,” he said. “You quit liking the things I like.” She protested mildly and pointed out a few instances such as going to see the dumb, folk-singer he liked so much and wouldn’t stop talking about, but he stopped her gently. “You went from liking them to just tolerating them. That made me feel as though you were just tolerating me, and that’s not enough, is it?” She hated when he was more aware than she, but she knew he was right.
The next weekend, she brought an old friend from her hometown and showed him the neighborhood where her life had been for ten years in exchange for his truck and help with loading the boxes. On Saturday, they went to the brewery around the corner where she had inhabited a corner writing and sampling IPAs on most days since they had opened and he caught out one of her friends with his easy grin and well-worn flannel and ended up hooking up with her in the now barren bedroom of the apartment on an air mattress in the middle of the floor while she lay awake in the main room on the frameless futon that was being left behind on the curb in the morning, the failure of her relationship on view to the world.
She listened to the noises from the bedroom meditatively until they began to blend into those of the surrounding city, drowning her with all of the weight of everything that had been slowly building and now rushed in as a tidal event. Hypnotized to the edge of paralysis, she could feel her eyelids falling under the pressure as she descended into sleep. Suddenly, she gasped and her eyes flew open. She bolted upright and realized she had stopped breathing for a moment. Confusion clouded her mind as she looked around the empty room, gasping in distress, not realizing it was a room she’d spent so many nights wrapped in her boyfriend’s arms on the couch as they watched the flickering screen of the television he had taken with him when he’d moved out, the television he was already watching with someone else in his arms on a new futon from Ikea, probably yammering on about the same folk singer. After a moment, her mind and breath calmed as her bearings returned and the streetlights shone in, making shadows familiar to her as she rocked herself with her arms wrapped around her knees.
The exhortations from the bedroom had stopped and the city slowed down as the night wore on, allowing her senses to recover. As she lay back down, she thought of going home in the morning, but her eyes stayed open until the streetlight turned to sunlight. She couldn’t fall asleep as her mind raced, trying to figure out if she was going home, or just running away.
