The Modern Sisyphus

Now

This is how it goes. I begin again.

I loved her, this much is true, and people will say I didn’t, but I did. Who are they to say that, though, anyway? Everyone defines love how they’ve experienced it. Some definitions are tender, and some are violent, and neither is less worthy of the label.

I walk around the dead city. The little rivers and moats which threaded through the walking routes like arteries of the human body; the water held in the modern architecture of the business district fell black under the darkness of night; lifeless. Men in business suits with forgettable faces, women who ask for attention even as they walk in the dark, with bright clothes and begging eyes, but who ultimately always fall short of the mark.

I make up, in my mind as I walk, a map of her face, her body; a dictionary of words which fell from her mouth in my presence, a vast (yet never vast enough) library of quirks and clothes and idiosyncrasies. She slips away even as imagine her.

It is an age-old story. If something had to happen to her, why could it have not been a glorious, burning out sort of story, rather than a candle tittering out, gasping for oxygen, bleeding wax over my hands? And yet, even after the wax solidifies, it leaves its raw-skinned mark on my palm, which I cannot scrape off with all the might of Lady Macbeth as she is slowly driven insane.

Then

The rumble of tyres on wet gravel excites her as we set out onto the road. The petrol needle reaches beyond the marker for ‘full’, and the clutch is tricky, propelling us down the otherwise quiet street in a series of giggle-inducing bunny hops. She tells me I will be paying for the replacement gear shift, or clutch, whatever should break first, but with a playfulness in her words which relaxes me.

We drive along in relative silence, but these are the best moments. Because it’s not complete silence. These are the moments I would remember. With one hand at 2 o’clock the other would reach over to trace her wrist, the veins and tendons underneath her thin skin, thread my fingers through hers. There’s a heartbeat somewhere, thumping between the fingers, but neither of know whose it is.

The outline of her body between the car seat and the seatbelt reads like a triptych as my eyes scan down, like a modern Flaming June with the red hair and dress to match. Eyes on the road, she says, and I smile, lingering on her for a moment longer. This should have been where it ended, when I turn my eyes back to the road – the danger is supposed to be over. We drive on. She puts her sleek, pale feet up on the dashboard and her dress slides down her thigh. And the last thing I hear before the crash, as I glance sideways to look at her and she glances straight ahead once more, is a small hiccup in her throat; so small it could easily have been missed. But I am sure of it; it is as if she is trying to choke out a panicked phrase but there had been no time to organise her thoughts and lay them succinctly onto her tongue.

It is instinct, after the hiccup. 20 tons of steel flies towards us, unmitigated, unrelenting. Or more precisely, it flies towards me, headlong, the driver honking intermittently but to no avail as I freeze entirely and my knuckles go white around the steering wheel. My right hand holds the muscles and tendons which determine the future entirely. I swerve dramatically right as the blood at the base of my spine boils to white-hot.

And then: electricity pulses through both of us, conduits, and the car jolts as it turns and flips. With a hard crunch the car rests, finally, upside-down, chugging smoke inward to my eyes. The hood breaks away from the car and crashes to the ground, and, pinned between the roof of the car and the steering wheel, I find that moving around cuts my neck and hands on shattered glass wherever I reach.

And then I see her, through the one eye which can see anything at all past the grey of the steering wheel. Upside down, neck bent at an awkward angle as she is pressed against the roof of the car, looking at me with a desperation in her eyes that I would see ever after on the dark background of my own closed eyelids. She chokes back her own blood, looking at me all the while. There is something sharp pressing into her gut, and she leaks blood over it. This is the candle, being snuffed slowly, I think. We both know what will happen, so we don’t dare try to say anything, or reach for each other. The car is clogged with smoke. I close my eyes so I don’t have to look at her any longer.

Now

Surely no human being should rightfully be condemned to this much suffering.

It wasn’t only that she’d died, it was that she’d died and I hadn’t. For some time after her death I’d wake up, on the nights I would be able to fall asleep in the first place at all, and have the overwhelming urge to cut my hand off, that which had caused so much damage. I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car since. I am like John Keats’ pale knight, loitering slowly as the sedge has withered from the lake and no birds sing. The narrator asks me: for why do you loiter? And I respond: because the only thing in the world that I love is gone.

Night has fallen over the city where she once was alive, yet again. The day has crawled by with hours bleeding into each other and I depart again for my nightly walk through the business district.

This is how it goes. I begin again.