Departures

How did we end up here?  

I touched your hand . It was one of the only parts of you which didn’t have a wire or tube or something medical and important looking which I was scared of knocking. You felt cool and fleshy and not like you at all. I pushed down the thought that kept seeping and bleeding through, that the goodbye I was trying to both summon and hide from was too late. That this body before me was a mere casing for something which had already flown free.

This place wasn’t where you were meant to be. This wasn’t you. Far from the couch you reclined upon for as much of your time as you could get away with, adoring dog sprawled over your legs. But more than that. Something had been added and something taken away from this sleeping form. The latter perhaps a missing torment that had piggybacked you since forever. So all that was left was an unfamiliar stillness. No disguises. No sleight of hand tricks to distract yourself. A disconcerting peace.

“Listen, Doll,” you often said, erstwhile cigarette in hand. “It’s all going to be perfect.”

And maybe you believed that. The next holiday. The next pay day. The next achievement. The next thing. There would be a way out and you would find it. At one point the answer was even going to be me. Until I became yet another disappointment like the holidays which, paradisiacal in anticipation, three days in, had found you restless.

But you were never one for sentimentality or convention. I remember when your troubled neighbour came to your door late one night requesting some paper.

“For a suicide note,” he had added.

You rifled through some drawers, found some paper, handed it over.

“All the best,” you said, as you shut the door, as though simply paying the milkman. You said you had no time for people making threats.

“If that’s what someone wants to do,” you said, taking another puff of your cigarette,  “Do it.”   

We had been called in to ‘say our goodbyes’. You. Should. Not. Be. Here. With these people, strangers, doctors, nurses . One of the staff hovered in the background, perhaps checking I was not ripping out anything crucial that was making all the monitors hum and beep at regular intervals like breathing creatures. Especially as I had been introduced into the cubical as ‘an ex’. Perhaps they thought I had murderous intentions following an acrimonious breakup. Only a flimsy pale blue curtain separated us from unknown others in untold desperation but a few feet away. There were about a dozen sectioned off areas in this ward alone each with their own stories, quite possibly experiencing the worst time of their lives. On my way in from the waiting room, a lady coming out hugged me hard. Nothing said. No details exchanged. Just two passing strangers united in the moment.  

I wore oversized leopard-print sunglasses. Yes, I felt ridiculous wearing novelty beachwear here in the middle of the night but after ‘the phone call’, I had automatically grabbed them on the way out. Behind them I could perhaps hide what some might see as an inappropriate, disproportionate reaction. Then followed long stretches of motorway, hospital corridors, late night shift workers shuffling by, stairs and lifts and crossroad passageways, trying to find you. I kept moving, looking at sign after sign of medical labelling overhead: Obstetrics, Maternity, Cardiovascular, Neuropathy...

In some ways familiar, these long tunnels of corridor reminding me of airports, night skies though reams of lit up glass reflecting our suitcase-wheeling selves in our holiday wardrobe. One time when we landed you were so desperate for a smoke you left me by the luggage carousel to spot and heave off our bags, only to realise that you had gone through Customs alone, along with my passport in your pocket. I was stuck on the other side. Powerless, I simply sat on one of the suitcases and waited.

Both of us searchers who spent some of our journeys travelling alongside the other.

The truth was there had been a thousand goodbyes. Our breakup goodbye had been destined from the start and too long in the making as we tried to work out or at least accept how it was so difficult to be together when we so desperately did not want to part. Hours spent sitting alone and together staring at tumultuous waves. Thoughts wild and confused.

Random happy memories surfacing. At the time unaware a particular scene was a memory in the making. Now assuming an unreachable, untouchable, keepsake quality. The crickets in stereo, full volume as we trudged up the hill to the villa. Limbs heavy with hours of sun. You cursing the fact when you booked the trip you didn’t realise there was such a steep walk from the beach. We would stop on a bench halfway up for dark nutty chocolate. Lights picking out the curve of coastline in the distance. In the foreground, feral cats on dirty pebbled tracks. Side by side in silent companionship. Why it could not always be like that I did not know but it would always change, like the ocean.       

I wondered in our darkest times how you could sleep so soundly when the whole world was upside down. And I wondered the same now. I wanted to know what you made of all of this. What should I say? What would you have said? Someone who was largely untroubled by etiquette and singularly unimpressed by destiny.

When you cut and snip and discard and declutter your way to the core of things, what was left? I suppose whatever it was that had brought me here, that was behind my swirling thoughts, the thing that was trying to find the right words.

The next significant other would be invited in any minute. A macabre ‘This is your life’. The monitors now sounded like a ticking clock.  

The first time I saw you, there was a sense of recognition. Perhaps from my future self. The one standing here now.

“Hello,” you had said.

I relived that moment. And goodbye was impossible.

“Hello,” I said. And I put my sunglasses on, draw back the blue curtain and headed out into the night, taking you with me.