Cold

It’s not yet 5am. It is dark still. I turn over to face the window. Moonlight settles reluctantly on the tree outside. I trace the tree’s dull outline with my eyes, a thick trunk grotesquely twisting into small branches. I count 27 branches visible in this light. I grow bored. 

I feel the weight of exhaustion pulling at my limbs in mockery and wonder if sleep may still take me. It is unlikely. My head still throbs from the noise of the night, the relentless berating.

I become aware of a small part of my ankle protruding from my pyjama bottoms, sitting uncomfortably on the mattress. It must have been four days since I had last stretched a sheet over the bed. No, five. Maybe more. I have lost track. The bare mattress disgusts me, but I won’t do anything about it. I can’t. Maybe I can. No, it must be impossible. I am too tired for this. I hug the flannel tighter around me. His flannel. 

The last time he wore it, summer had only just begun to subside, and fall had curled lazily around Us. I had held on tighter to his sleeve than usual, feeling the soft fabric against my skin. When he asked if I was ok I had smiled at him and kissed him on the cheek. “Perfect.” I was. It all was. 

I had convinced him to take me apple-picking. “It’ll be cute,” I whined when he had protested. “We’ll look so picture-perfect it’ll make other people sick.” He rewarded me with that laugh I loved so much and his reluctant agreement.

The apple orchard was about an hour’s drive from my house, but I relished the long car ride, the happy chatter and the watching of the autumnal trees along the roads in their slow burn, some tinged red at the ends and some entirely eaten up. When We got out of the car the air had a crisp edge, so I had curled around his arm.

Now the air is more than crisp and there is no arm to cling to. I curl up more to shelter from the biting winter cold. I consider turning up the heat, but it’s so far away. Away from the cocoon, I am swaddled in. Maybe later. 

I question if I should do something. It is clear that once again sleep has rejected me and I am to stay awake. I won’t get up. Perhaps I could read. I used to like reading. Or watch a movie. There was a time when my days would start with yoga and coffee. I would be at work by 8 or on campus by 9. All I did was move ceaselessly through time and moments. The last moment I remember being entirely present in was the apple orchard. 

We were moving our way through the labyrinth of trees slowly, me taking my time to teasingly inspect each apple three times over, him smiling lazily. I felt We were something out of a montage in a romantic comedy and said as much. “I’m sure we’d be dressed better if we were,” he had responded. 

I don’t remember my retort exactly, it was unimportant. I remember thinking how wrong he was, though. He looked perfect, with the soft mid-morning light caressing his cheeks and the red of his flannel blending seamlessly in with the red apples around Us. 

We continued moving through, stopping at a little arch in a clearing that had vines twisting around it. The vines had not yet felt the cool touch of autumn and still shone with brilliant green. I made a comment about how perfect it would be for a wedding, surely that was its purpose? I barely registered him stiffen beside me. I split from him to investigate the one small white flower that remained on the tangled branches. I think often about that moment. 

I hadn’t resented his lack of interest in the arch, or the small flower adorning it, but I wish I had stayed, just a little longer. I wish I had sat down under the arch for a moment, taken a deep breath, relished the perfection of the moment. Instead, We kept walking.

It aches to remember these things. I wish I didn’t. I wish I had crawled into bed in an old hoodie last night instead. I seem never to notice the way I infect things until I am left gangrenous and in need of an amputation. 

I decide to put on a movie. A distraction. The light of the laptop hurts my eyes a little and I squint while I peruse the options. No romantic comedies. No movies with sad endings. No movies I haven’t seen before, I don’t want surprises. No movies I saw with him. The options I am left with leave a bad taste in my mouth. I pick one at random, something to not feel the interminable drip of time so profoundly. 

I immediately regret my choice as the movie starts. It was one of my favourites when I was younger. I must have watched it upwards of 30 times. I’m sure I could quote at least three-quarters of it by heart. I shouldn’t tether it to this moment. 

My alternatives seem so unappetising that I let it play. The plot rolls past me without me even noticing it. Instead, I spend my time wondering.

I wonder if I should have seen the emptiness in his eyes. I wonder if I could have known that with the sickening of summer the home I had built inside him was falling into disrepair, the walls cracking, the garden browning and dying off. I wonder if I could have stopped it. 

Of course I couldn’t have. I had no way of noticing the shift, no reason to question his refusal to come up after dropping me off that day on the excuse that he was tired. It had been a long day, I was tired too. When everything was dying outside, I had no reason to think that extended to my life too. 

I wonder what I did wrong, if my wedding arch comment was too much, if I was too pushy, if he grew bored of me. I wonder what he would think of me now. I imagine he would be disgusted. Freezing in a half-made bed with the credits for a film I didn’t watch rolling in front of me, I am disgusted. 

I get up to turn up the heat. A small beam of light peers in through the window. The sunrise, the dawn of a new day a promise that, in spite of myself, I keep. I don’t go back to bed.