A Tidy Life
He didn't go into the shop often any more. They used to go almost every day, both of them working or chatting in between sips of coffee and a regular touching of knees. After, the visits petered out to a random appearance every few months. He would come in softly, order, and sit in whichever seat gave him the best view of the door. She wasn’t going to come through it, but his heart would stop for just a moment when it opened just as he always told her it had every time she had materialized in the past. Back then, his smile would sprout and grow and then fix in that crooked spot that always made her blush and look away for just a moment. Then, she would finish her bounce across the room, kiss his face as he rose, and grab his hand to sit. It always felt the proper way to end the day apart or start one together.
The smile had been gone for years, but, now, he had made it to the point where he could sometimes crack one at his folly in even looking. He found he could make himself softly chuckle sometimes with a comment on something he would immediately want to share with her. On Friday evenings, when he allowed himself to leave the flat, his friends laughed at the dark humor of his three-beer musings before he cut himself off and walked home down that stretch of road. In those moments, he ceased to exist and someone else took his place. His heart didn’t beat and he didn’t breathe as his mind was taken over, all of which were fine with him as some other being who wasn’t composed of a vast, empty space possessed him for a moment. Maybe it was a past self or maybe it was someone coming he couldn’t imagine could ever exist. After the smile or laugh would fade, his heart would start beating again, but in a lower spot in his cavity, mournfully tolling the time in the void.
Most days, he smiled wanly and not often. He wasn’t sad all the time. Actually, he was happy in some sense of the word. His days were full of family and friends and work. He kept up their tradition of seeing all the academy award nominated films every year at their little neighborhood theater and he still enjoyed a nice single malt or old-fashioned in the same glass they had shared one in for years, carefully shaving an orange peel off just so, above the pith, and sitting at their table and sliding it to each other as their other hands brushed and squeezed.
Occasionally, he still cooked elaborate meals for himself in the small kitchen in the pans she had left behind, the space much larger without the threat of wrapping and lifting her onto the countertop where her hands would grasp his hair and hold his head at the perfect angle to bite his lower lip. It was what the English would call “A nice, tidy life,” but one he couldn’t see a downside of an end.
In that dark space of his existence, regret bubbled when he saw others holding hands and gazing into each others' eyes at the shop and on the street. At those moments, he worried he hadn't said it enough, shown it enough, trusted his heart enough to give everything he desired to give, everything he felt she deserved. Now, his chance was gone.
Regret is a useless attachment, he learned at the weekly Buddhist meditations at the center two blocks from the house that had flyers in the window advertising the classes each week. The presenter, a middle-aged, white lady that spent her days walking miles around the neighborhood alone, dressed in the burgundy and yellow cloths of the order or whatever they called it, focused the classes on fear and its relationship to attachment. “Release attachment, release fear,” was the gist and it made sense of course. But, what if you were scared the release was forgetting and that forgetting was a fear worse than the pain of remembering? He found it difficult to let go of that sharp edge of the knife.
The last time he called her number, her voice was no longer on the outgoing message. It had been replaced by what sounded like the voice of a young girl, maybe just getting her first phone and excitedly setting up her voice mail. "Hi! This is Joanne. Leave a message and I will call you as soon as I can!" That had been two years ago. He did listen to the voicemail from her he had saved though it made him well up in tears as soon as her voice came over the wire, "Running a little late, hon. Be there soon. I love you." He had been talking to another regular in the shop and had not heard the ring from deep in his coat pocket. He never was able to talk to the man the same way again. It was not his fault of course. It was nobody's fault that he had missed his chance to talk to her one more time.
“Soon” turned into late which turned into very late. He called her number over and over with no response other than her cheerful, recorded voice. “Hi, this is Stella, Your call is the most important thing I’ve missed today, so please leave a message.” The children had not heard from her for hours either. When a call finally came, his heart did stop for three beats and the light faded as he took the first steps into that void as he saw the caller ID. He didn’t remember the drive to the hospital afterwards, only the look on the face of the officer when he entered the ED, a face he would never be able to remember, but a look that he saw still everywhere..
The last voicemail was still there. His daughter kept trying to get him to upgrade his phone, but he didn't want to take the chance of losing that message in the transition though she said she was 99% sure she could transfer it for him. “Plus, Dad, Mom knew all about you. How could she not? She wouldn’t mind. You’re being dumb.” He smiled at this because he knew what it meant coming from his daughter. He was dumb, and it was okay, so he kept his aging phone and her name stayed at the top of his favorites, even when little Joanne took over the line after he eventually stopped the auto payment on it. The number had remained unassigned for a while and her outgoing message was still there though it wouldn’t allow any messages to be left. He hated that, as he still had more to say. Now, that was gone too.
He processed updating his phone intellectually of course, trying to run reins on his heart. His mind told him it was fine, but eventually joined in with his heart to conceive a plan to give him a constant, something he could hold onto when he felt as though he might go flying off the great world. So, rather than replacing it, he kept the phone and got a fancy, new one with a different number and made everybody learn it to many grumbles. The other, he kept on his nightstand in the wooden caddy she had bought him early in their life together, where it sat and blinked and provided comfort, keeping the world from spinning quite so fast, her voice, just a click away.
It was fine. It had to be. For four years, it had been fine existing or not as Schrödinger’s cat in that black space. He missed smiling and laughing and having his bottom lip bit. He missed a lot, but that was okay, he thought. If you’re lucky, you only miss the important things.
