Please Don't Go

It’s a Thursday and in its Thursdayness it is grey and unremarked. The daily annotation deconstructs the flow of time, a swamping of cheap custard over the artistry of a pâtissier. The point is drowned out. Meaning is washed away, and few will ever go in search of its bloated corpse.

Dan wends his weary way home. Drops his work bag in the porch. That bag haunts his life. Its position as a sentry is a badly thought out mistake. He’s reminded of the work he hasn’t completed each and every time he passes through the front door. That bag stains his life with misery. The weight of it drags him away from everything that matters, even his work.

The stresses and worries of his day insulate him from the reality lurking in his home. He’s propelled through his house by the momentum of a well-rehearsed routine. Having made it to the kitchen, he runs the cold water tap, fills a glass and rehydrates himself. Washes away the worst of the dirt and poisons out there in a world gone harsh with twisted expectation. Once the glass is rinsed and cleaned and on the drainer, he leans on the sink and stretches. His gaze stutters out over the garden and the length of the grass pains him. This time of year, the lawn is wayward and contrary and the only way he could keep on top of it would be to live in the bushes with two large pairs of scissors forever in his hands. He tries not to look across at his neighbour’s perfectly manicured lawn. They are retired and keep their garden in better shape than the hair on Dan’s head. He doesn’t know how they do it. The bigger part of him doesn’t want to know. There has to be more to life than gardening. A thanklessly endless task with scant reward. There are no bragging rights to a well kempt lawn as far as he's concerned.

As he stands at the kitchen sink, looking out of the window, he experiences a dizzying, falling sensation that makes no sense to him and yet whispers a truth to him all at the same time. His fingers dig into the worktop and he grits his teeth as he does everything he can to repel the truth that has been lumbering towards him like a tired old bull for some while now. He’s heard its laboured grunts and now he can smell it’s mangy hide and feel its fetid breath on the back of his neck. 

Sniffing at the spoiled air, he struggles to find anything familiar in the home he has shared with Julie for these past seven years. Seven years is when the dread itch occurs. A compulsion to try the neighbouring lawn on for size. Seven years is a long time to wear the same skin, the itch is an urge to shed that skin and become something different in an attempt to find something that you’ve never once tried to look for and probably never will. Dan cannot get his head around such a stretch. The hamster wheel of seven days is bad enough, anything beyond that lies in a mist that gets thicker with every turn of the weekly wheel.

He pads out of the kitchen and makes his way to the living room only to discover what he already knew to be the case. There is nothing alive in this room. To call this space a living room is a joke. So little living has occurred here. The dark, baleful eye of the TV keeps watch like an exam invigilator. Restricts to a point of breathlessness.

At the foot of the stairs, a voice quietly screams at him not to go up. That place isn’t meant for him. Here, on the ground, he’s safe and there will not be the fall that he foresaw only moments ago. He wants to heed that voice, but he realises he has nowhere else to go. Not that he’s going anywhere any time soon. What awaits him upstairs is change. A change that will occur whether he’s present or not. Change waits for no man, but it will pause as he takes his cue and enters the stage to play his bit part.

Each and every step upwards is an unwarranted and unwelcome torture. Dan reverts to a childlike state and that child is crying and begging and pleading him not to do this. He has no choice though, and so he drags that poor child up every step with him. There is a sound ahead. A tune he can’t quite catch. He has to face the music, but it seems it’s not his song. Not today. Sometimes you have to dance to someone else’s tune and there is nothing you can do about it, not unless you want to stand at the edge of the dancefloor and watch your life play out in absentia.

In the bedroom that was once theirs, but ceased to be whilst Dan’s gaze was distracted by the bewildering world outside its window, Julie is sitting as though she’s on a train to an undisclosed destination. Heading to a place that Dan will never find, let alone visit. Next to her is a suitcase. Her baggage is on the seat that Dan would like to sit upon, but she’s not about to move it, and she knows he won’t ask her to. It’s her baggage and it has deprived Dan of her. He sees that now. Thought it gone, but it was there throughout their time together. 

In her expectation that Dan won’t request the seat occupied by her suitcase she’s right, but as for a number of her other assumptions, she will never know the truth of them. She will never ask herself whether there was an alternative. She needed conviction and she found that conviction all by herself.

“I’m leaving,” she says redundantly.

Dan stands despite his being poleaxed. As his soul collapses at his feet, he resents the steadfastness of his legs. Their habit of bearing him aloft is not required right now. He’d rather join his broken heart and lie on the floor as he’s bathed in his errant wife’s lies and betrayal.

“Why?” he asks in a mockery of her own redundancy.

“It wasn’t working,” she replies far too quickly and easily.

“Wasn’t?” he echoes.

“Don’t do this,” she warns.

“Do what?!” he protests, “I’ve just walked into the car crash of the end of my marriage and you’re telling me not to talk?”

“There’s no use…” she trails off.

He sees it then, but refuses to believe it. He digs in. He talks for the both of them, and as he does, all he confirms is the suspicion that was always the truth of the matter. Julie withdrew within herself, created an abstract and unreal version of Dan that she could use to justify the course of action she’d already decided upon.

“You’ve cheated on me,” he says quietly as he understands what it is that she’s done.

“I have not!” she cries. But there are no tears to accompany her words.

He nods self-affirmation of his accusation, “you answered all your own questions in your own head. You made a meek version of me and forced him to say yes to anything and everything you asked of him. You’ve done me wrong, Julie. You’ve done me so wrong.”

She shrugs. That is all she can give him now. He’s right. She made assumptions and confirmed them in his absence in order to validate her own absence. She gave her own imagination the proxy vote and between that and her, they voted Dan off the board and out of their business.

“It’s over, Dan,” she whispers.

He looks at her and wonders how long ago she left. If that is, she was ever here. Wonders how a person can absent themselves in such a way. He never stood a chance. She vetoed him and then secretly unmade everything before ever saying a word.

“I’ll carry your bag,” he says for want of something to do.

She shrugs again, but allows him to do this one last thing for her. There is nothing conciliatory in it. It’s her right. She’s owed as far as she’s concerned.

“What about the rest of your stuff?” he asks as he closes the boot of her car.

She smiles a thin and mean smile that makes him feel small and stupid. Later, he will open her wardrobes and wander the house looking for something she might have left. There is plenty that she could have taken, but that isn’t the point. None of those things matter to her and their remaining with Dan is a statement, a curse even. A reminder of a lack of meaning and a lack of life. Baubles in the tomb she has buried him in.

Before she clambers into her car and makes her getaway, Dan wants to ask her one last thing. Knows he shouldn’t, but he’s run out of cheeks to turn. Wants to make a point, even with all the evidence telling him that that point will never land. He lives in hope though, even in this acid mist, he believes that hope is a good thing. Maybe there is a naivety to this belief of his, but he’d rather have Father Christmas in his life than an orgy of conspicuous consumption that eats the souls of the participants.

“Tell me this, when you’ve nursed your fear of abandonment for so long, do you feel a loss like this, or is it just more of the same? Do you feel this right now?” It’s a genuine question. He wants to understand what is happening here. What came between them. 

Her response is to freeze, and in her stillness she creates an image that is burnt into Dan’s memories for all time. This is a lesson learned for him. That he’s a flawed specimen of a flawed tribe. That he’s not made in the image of God after all, that isn’t quite it. His factory settings all point in the wrong direction for that. Julie’s fear of abandonment induced her to obsess over the loss of her marriage and in the end, she didn’t wait for the bell, she came out of her corner and she battered her opponent into submission before he could get up from his stool. 

It was never supposed to be like this, Dan knows that, but there is no turning back now. Not for Julie and not for the version of Dan that existed right up until she cut the photo of their marriage in half. Remember the lesson, he thinks to himself and the lesson is that we make ourselves in the image of God when we look upon Him. That’s when we start turning the dials and correcting our settings. When we aim up and find a point to our existence that goes way beyond a spreadsheet or choosing matching curtains and duvet covers.

A week passes, but Dan isn’t aware of the passage of time. He dwells in a bewilderment of pain. Somehow, as he haunts the place that was once his home, he finds the photo album. An affectation of his from a time that no longer exists, and perhaps never did. 

Julie laughed at him when he insisted on good, old fashioned photos. Accused him of an obsolescent madness. He had wanted something tangible and real to record their time together. Wanting to capture something that he could hold onto. The shiny, falsely smiling surfaces of screens made him feel a sense of loss. The glass created a prison and he wasn’t sure which side he was on. In the end, he knew it didn’t matter. There was a division and an isolation occurring. The screen cut the umbilical cord of connection and once that happened, there was no return. 

These photos are the pages of a book. They tell a story. He pauses before opening the front cover. He needs to do this right. He sits himself comfortably on a bed that was once filled with marriage, values and a future, and he begins.

He reads each and every photo with a reverent intensity. There is a secret here that he must unlock. The camera doesn’t lie, but in his denial he was made a liar. Aiding and abetting Julie as she exited a life made unreal by their jettisoning the effort required to live. They coasted through the rooms of this house and went through the motions. They swam aimlessly and marked time until the cold waters drew them down and stilled the breath of their love.

Now, as he looks upon the smiling faces of the man he once was, and the woman he’d loved with all his heart, he wonders what it was they were doing here. There is no image of God here. And there are no children. They were in no rush to have children. The absence of kids in the photographs speaks to him, but there is no familiarity to the language. His life has been a means to an end. There is nothing worthy in it. 

He's half-way through the album when he senses what it is that he searches for. 

His dreams.

There is shame in the selfishness of his search. They once shared dreams, but he cannot bring himself to look for those shared lost souls. Easier to find himself in the dreams he once had. Turning the page, he sees a change in Julie that stops his breath and the world around him. He shuts the album and closes his eyes for good measure.

Returning to the first page he can see that change from the outset. Was this always the case? Was this the woman he fell in love with?

The answer is that it is and it isn’t. He fell in love with the woman he now sees in the photos, but this woman never existed. He never really knew Julie, just as she chose to know an avatar of Dan as a means to exit a life that was never shared. He thinks back to the case on the bed taking his place at her side. Her fear. Her abandonment. Never letting him in in case he then rejected her. Rejecting him as a defence to a sense of loss that she had felt since childhood. 

The sins of the father. 

But he wasn’t my father, the thought is random. A half-hearted protestation that helps Dan along the way to acceptance. The sin is real, but it’s not his. He lets it go and says a prayer, in the hope that Julie will one day also learn to let go. She doesn’t deserve to carry a burden that was never hers. She deserves better. She deserves to be better.

Dan smiles and plays with the pages of the album. The reading of the photos is no longer necessary, and so he flicks between the pages in a failed attempt to catch the universe out. Despite his acceptance, he wants more. Just a glimpse of something else. He wants an affirmation. Surely the last seven years meant more than this?

Back and to he goes in a random arc, until the page falls open for the very last time. His brow knits in consternation. The tea leaf pattern of photos is telling him something that he would do well to attend to. There is a meaning here that will serve him well. He stares until his head hurts and he goes right on staring through that pain. This won’t beat him. He’s suffered enough loss, but he’s no loser. He’s seen losers and he doesn’t want to taste the dull copper taste of his blood being spilt so easily and pointlessly. There is more to life and he intends to live it, however hard that may seem right now.

He's reminded that in order to embrace destiny, a hero must relinquish everything from his former life. This isn’t loss, it’s merely necessary. A clearing of the way. There is still fight in him. He looks up from the two pages of photos, finds the dimming light of the closing day and acknowledges an end that will soon enough herald a new beginning. Sunsets are more beautiful than sun rises, they have been longer in the making.

Casting his eyes down in another silent prayer, he sees what it is that he was always meant to see. Remembers his words at the time of the photo being taken. How the rock formations were reminiscent of the Scotland of his boyhood dreams.

“I’ll live there one day,” he whispers to himself.

He’d said this to Julie after he’d taken the photo, and upon receipt of this message she’d flown into an inexplicable rage. Her take on this statement was instantaneous abandonment. She’d accused Dan of treachery. Told him that he’d entrapped her on false pretences. She had no intention of moving to Scotland. She resented his brutal, unilateral announcement. Scotland was welcome to him and good riddance to boot.

They seldom fell out. Dan had been disconcerted by Julie’s sudden outburst. This was a one off that Dan never wanted to revisit or repeat, and so he avoided the hammer drill that would have taken them apart. Had taken to silence as a response, and never spoke of Scotland again.

The truth of it was that he was repeating the words of a little version of himself. The child who was a dreamer. He’d never visited Scotland. That was the real betrayal. Dan had silenced his inner child, failing to explore the dreams bestowed upon him. 

Now things would change and Dan would change with them. In the pages of this visual bible was the message that had awaited him all his life. His dreams weren’t lost to him after all.