Debts

He left her with an angry message. For months he had known their story was finished, and yet, the story kept adding excursus after excursus. The truth was he wasn’t brave enough to do what he needed to do for his own happiness.

When he had realised months before that Vanessa had an interest in him, he had felt lucky. Here was this beautiful woman, ten years younger than him, funny and clever all in one, and she was interested in him. In a few weeks, they had fallen together, like an avalanche.

Like most irrational stories, the problems started almost immediately. The drugs, the debts, the lies. He had known from the start she carried a heavy emotional baggage of mistakes, but she wasn’t very good at admitting them. The promise that the drugs were behind her were the words of an addict. The people she claimed she owed money from the past revealed themselves as new debts, new sellers. She was the eternal buyer of anything anyone had to sell.

But he was in love, so he ignored most of it, like a driver who believes he is blind only because he doesn’t realise that it’s night and he should really turn the lights on.

The debts grew, and his money dwindled. At the next request for money, he put a stop to the drugs, the debts, the lies. He told her enough was enough, she had taken everything he had to give, including his love, and he had nothing left. He left town and started over somewhere else. Out of sight…

But it was not going to be that easy. It started with angry conversations. He told Vanessa all the things he had never been able to tell her when he should have, when things could have taken a different turn. He said all the words he had never said. He said words that left her speechless for a change. He had finally started to win a few arguments. The only problem was that all of these angry conversations were happening in his head.

He liked his new town. It wasn’t too different from where he had been living before. All the towns in that country looked the same at their core. His new job was the same. Same job, different place. He got along well with his new colleagues.

Just seeing new people was refreshing, as if new blood was running in his veins. So many new people to meet, so many new opportunities. He was in no rush, introvert as he was, any new encounter was too full of information to overdo it.

And living on the outskirts of town now meant that the countryside was only a few doorsteps away. On sunny mornings he could see a few sheep in the distance. The green out of town was greener than any other place he had been to before. When it came, the rain made the green more effervescent, almost unnatural.

He would take long walks in the woods. He would bring his e-book, find a bench or a broken trunk and he would sit and read for hours, in a place where the trees actually smelled of trees.

And yet, even lost in his books, she would not go away. An episode in the narrative or a sentence would trigger lost memories of her, and he would feel all the pain fresh as if baked that very morning.

When he was most lonely and felt the need, he imagined sex they had never had: she was passionate and hungry as she had never been, instead of the lifeless being he had fucked with effort for months in the attempt to turn her, like Pinocchio, into a real human being.

He took on hiking because the woods would hide him from her influence, while at the same time the effort freed his body of any needs. The sound of the birds, the whispers left by the movement of small animals and the small crying of the leaves falling in the wind and cracking under his feet were at times his only company.

There he hooked up with another hiker, Jade, who was smart and was funny and seemed to really care for him. They took it easy, met when they felt like it, like people who had been hurt before.

And when they made love, he would see Vanessa and the thought both disturbed and excited him because Jade knew what she was doing and she was there with him when they were together, not lost in some selfish and paranoid daydream.

After a while he told Jade about Vanessa’s ghost that he kept carrying with him. He had deleted her on every social media he possessed, so there was no will behind his obsession. He told Jade he had taken up hiking so his brain would absorb the shape and the sounds of the woods and be empty of anything else, like the space between trees where the leaves fall. And he told Jade that sometimes her face would become Vanessa’s face and he couldn’t stop even when he was scared.

Jade looked at him with what he thought was compassion. She gave him a long, human hug, but they didn’t meet much after. He couldn’t blame her. He had become the paranoid who saw ghosts everywhere.

One day he saw her in the woods. Vanessa seemed so vivid in his mind and yet she made no sound when she popped out from behind a tree trunk, with her rueful smile, with just that tiny little gap between her front tooth and her canine. Through her small, blue eyes he could see the vastness of the forest behind her. He felt something tightening cruelly in his chest and he dropped to his knees and cried. Vanessa hugged him and held him as she had never done before and his crying became louder, boundless. He shook for a long time, while her image faded. And when he raised his sore eyes she was gone.

But for how long?