Plans

It was at my coffee table where you explained to me your plans. 

You said that women always have a lot of plans, but they never seem to happen. Saying something trite, like, “I’m not like most women,” you revealed to me a house on a hill, a shallow riverbank, a bookshop smelling faintly of vanilla. You revealed a garden, a woven rug, a cat, a pair of comfortable running shoes, a place far, far, from everything that had hurt you. 

I wish I could go back and tell you to keep your plans to yourself. 

See, because under that bare bulb hanging over my coffee table--my only table--I liked the way the loose threads on your sweater and the flyaway hairs on your head were illuminated. I liked how the ripples of my tea were concentric circles of grey and gold. Though the window we sat beside only half-closed and an awful draft howled through the room, and the sink behind us dripped into a shallow dish for Jean-Luc, and Jean-Luc pressed his cold, wet nose against your naked ankles prickling from the cold, I was thinking of how content I was. 

Like birthday wishes said aloud, a plan uttered to another becomes obsolete. Every plan you’d ever had came pouring from your lips and glistened at the corners of your eyes until there were no plans left. You realized your futility at some point, too, and that’s when your tears sprung free and traced rivulets down your skin. Outside, seven stories down, streetlamps shone in perfect spots along the shadowy boulevard, but in my apartment the kitchen was one great, shining patch of gold. And the plans were infinite. 

When you fell asleep on the scrabble board, I lifted you and all your dead weight to the bed and thought about how skinny you really were. I pushed your beanie over your eyebrows and tucked the covers under your arms, and you mumbled softly, something I didn’t hear and never would. I slept on the couch, and when I woke up you had left without a trace: a bed made, your things gathered up and squirreled away, your teacup washed and put away. Even the leaf you had tracked in from your boot was gone. A plan, I realized: “To take as little and leave as much as possible.”

You left so little, but you took so much. 

I knew this to be true two weeks later, when your note was found: In the night, after I’d gone to sleep, you’d taken off for your plans. Your mother shook the paper under my nose and asked what it meant, because she’d long stopped trying to understand you. It was so hard to tell her, Evangeline, that I had no idea what you were going to do, when of course I knew exactly what you’d gone and done. 

I went out looking for you after the third week. In your plans you headed east, where you wanted to go to college but never did, and I found your car and your footsteps in the patchy mud at the side of a road but I never found you. Four weeks, and the police said you’d either come back home or you were gone for good. 

You were gone for good. Your plans had been exhausted. 

I returned home when they found you, and I didn’t go to that brief service of yours. I stood in the kitchen for a long time, thumbing the smooth, varnished edges of the chair you’d sat in as you told me those plans of yours. The sun was out, but a steady cloud cover was rolling in, and the drip-drip of the sink was insistent and maddening, the thickening sky casting a shadow over the water in the metal dish, the concentric circles once black and then white. The draft picked up and gasped at the window. Torturously, I flicked on the bulb, waiting for the godly gold under which you’d described things that would never be.

But the lightbulb had burned out, dead. In a rage I flicked the switch back and forth, waiting for something to happen. Rain fell and pinged against the window frame, and I sunk to my knees, my fingers clenched around the switch, waiting for gold, gold, gold.

You took so much. 

And nobody was going to remember you, in the end. There was nothing to remember you by. Your plans had been spilled like blood on my round coffee table on a cloudless night, with the bulb I now knew to be dying humming, alive with electricity. Humming with life. A flood of regrets from an infinite black sea rushed up into my eyes, and I was crying though it was my plan to never cry over something as inevitable as death. 

My fault I never told you what happens when you tell your plans. 

My fault I never told your mother what your plans were. 

Someone brought me flowers that stayed in the hallway to wilt, and my fingers weakened from the switch until they drifted slowly down the wall, and when I opened my eyes again the world outside was dark and invading. Jean-Luc pressed his face against my palm, a constant. I curled my fingers over his soft head and pressed back the short fur, found the strength to peel myself off the cool tile floor and catch a breath of fresh air. I wrestled with the window until the mechanism broke and I tossed the splinters of the window frame to the floor and leaned out into the prevailing wind. My hair ruffled in the breeze and my eyes stung, and the world was ever so invasive. I opened my mouth, and the wind sucked out my voice. I clenched my teeth and whispered my plans. 

A truck to take me north. 

A jacket with a fur lining and some boots with black laces. 

A notebook with an infinite number of pages. 

A way to turn dark into light.