When Two People Decide

The tip of the sword is like my pen on linen paper. I write in haste every detail of how love dies.

The angel gives birth to the daughter of a monster, the vampire she loved. He died in battle and so, his friend, the Vampire of Ogrencisi followed her up the Balkan Mountain to kill her and take the baby as his ward for twenty-one years and shall marry her. She stays at a convent and after giving birth, the clouds occlude the sun, a sign that the vampire has arrived.

I write, the pen scratching on paper like bird’s feet scratching against the sky. He started it. We opened our marriage in attempts to simmer a cooking pot of stew. We ate the stew at opposite sides of the table. The children are gone. Some have married, others had careers. He said he was having an affair with a woman he met at a park. I looked up at him from the simmered stew and saw the man who made love to me those nights he left our bed afterwards to write at a pub where beer was more relaxing when served freshly frothing by a seedy waitress in tight pants.

I wanted to say: me too. But that seemed childish. I had no one. At least not yet. Did I want to have someone else? My heart skittered as though on panic attack. But I kept my distance by drinking from a glass some red wine. Classic drama. The wine screamed blood. The vampire is thirsty for the blood of an angel. The vampire is heavy in girth, massive and great. The horse he rode up the mountain to the convent of the nunnery where the angel gave birth, heaves to bring him up the promontory.

In my mind, he already was dead. I wrote about vampires and tonight, he will finally die. I would write him away, my dear Ogrencisi, fat vampire being bitten by an army of mosquitoes for he was full of blood.

I stood up and went over to watch cable TV, to watch the news. My eyes glazed over the moving pictures. Wordless, he was frozen in time, like a distillation, an imprint of the man who spoke first. He sat alone by the table and watched me, not there anymore, somewhere else but in his mind, I still sat there drinking my red wine. He shifted his weight on his chair and secured his eyeglasses before rubbing his beard.

I am thin as a reed, but no weaker than this obese man who had become odious behind the sofa where the dining table was. He waited. No, our love has not died yet. It takes two people to destroy love. He had, but I haven’t yet. Not that I didn’t want to, I loved him still because I wanted him to suffer before I decided to agree.

He stood up and scratched his elbow, a mannerism I had come to hate. So, this is how two people decide to end love. He shall wait for me before we could decide.

The vampire jumps down his horse and draws his sword. She appears before him, but already in flight. Her wings white as snow, spread wide as a mile from wingtip to wingtip.

I go up to our bedroom, pull my suitcase from beneath the bed and begin to stuff it with my clothes.

With one clean sweep of her heavy sword, the angel beheads the vampire. Blood gushes on the snow from his severed head. She lands on him and twists her blade precisely on his heart. Just to be certain.

The writing is certain now. I left him standing in the middle of the dining room and stepped down our apartment. It was snowing. He didn’t pretend to pull me back. He had decided who he wanted to be with even before he told me, precisely why he told me, that was obvious. Who the woman was, I had no idea, nor was I curious as to who she was.

It came like a heart attack, yes, but the effect was for me to absolutely stop everything as though we had been living a farce and he finally decided to pull down the curtains and show our true nature. Our true nature showed us in the beating heat of the sun, old, sullen and desperate for attention from the outside world. Even I, felt that way. I couldn’t think of anything except my story, my novel and how it could not go on because I was finally, tired.

So, this is how it appears. When two people make an agreement to stop loving each other. It was almost as though, he waited for me to decide and not wanting to push me out the door. I couldn’t think of where to go. Neither did he say: I could drive you to town, to your friend or sister or something. I held out my hand for a cab and told the driver to send me to a hotel. I wanted to be alone. It was vital to me. I didn’t want to think, I just wanted to write. Not that there was a deadline. The deadline was in my mind. All the words had aligned and could falter like the Tower of Babel if I did not put them to paper.

I went to a certain boutique hotel in town entered the room and left my suitcase by the door. I laid down for awhile on the nice fresh bed, not on some dead bed that had earned its keep all dented up in places and smelling of our ardent desires, to be free after all.

I felt chilly but stood up to a nearby pretty escritoire and began writing.

I wrote the death of Ogrencisi on a pad of linen hotel stationary. I will buy a laptop later during the day and submit my final chapter to my editor.

The love has died. I proudly told myself that I decided in the end who ended it.

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