The Breakup

Has the time come to leave this body then? This comfortable, slightly rotund, and rosy vessel that is Harry’s substantial form. I am convinced now that something terrible and irreversible is happening. Like a terminal illness, it had been slouching towards us for a long time, installing itself into every cell cunningly, without so much as a skipped beat. Now it has started blossoming in brackish colours. I fear for what would become of us.

I remember the fresh early days, the great pain of the beginning. Human birth is exceptionally traumatic for infants, and Harry’s was no exception. It’s like being scooped out of bed at three in the morning by an excavator and laid down in the middle of a fully packed stadium hosting the Pain Olympics, with the floodlights on. But the physical is only part of the suffering. The soul is also born then, just a moment after the body, with a large old quantum pop of virtual particles. It is terribly confusing to come from nothing. I was still a little stunned when I laid eyes on my Harry, a morning in summer. The green trees lashing one another outside. A strong boy, wriggling like an eel in the rubber-gloved doctor hands. Crying hard, his brand-new violet eyes straining in the direction where I, Harry’s Soul, had just popped into existence. Blood and quantum fluctuations is what everything is made of.

But this was a long time ago. Now, I am sitting here in adult Harry’s bedroom reminiscing, watching him sleep uneasily. Still handsome, with certain faintly female characteristics, a hint of weariness in his features, caring. Completely unsuspicious, he is a man who would pass any interview. Always wearing his wristwatch in bed. His wife does not like it but accepts it now. She is good to him. Their life is good to him. With its Egyptian cotton linen, the small Oriental rug on Harry’s side of the bed which though worn still provides itchy warmth for his feet first thing every morning. It lacks nothing this life. Their bedroom is spacious, with a view of the river and waste-high windows.

It is late and the city is approaching peak stillness, few lights are on in apartment buildings nearby. The silence is both oppressive and purging, it makes important things audible. The beautiful architectural house on the other side of the street reflecting the soft streetlights, dark and monolithic in its bulging concrete walls and sharp angles. Decorations on balconies nearby are already anticipating Christmas with impatient and efficient L-E-D light. My soft sentimental inclinations get the better of me and I drift in time, again, wondering how we got here. The soul knows much less than people give it credit for.

Harry's childhood is a happy memory, with a bruise. Long days of ochre light and sticky summer boredom in the country, catching lizards along the river in the hot afternoons, first kisses in the evenings. All the books about pirates and Indians we could lay hands on and an odd urge to write overly sentimental poetry every now and then. The shelves in our bedroom were bent beneath books about adventure. The richness of our life then like homemade butter. We felt terrific, we even had a dog. But then – a punch to our little face. The divorce of our parents was hard on Harry and hovered above our jolly little life like a Hindenburg for many years. I still don’t quite understand why. It is traumatic by definition, of course, but they both loved him, us. They cared. Even if we lived with our mother, we spent a lot of time with our father too, whole summers by the sea. Our birthdays and even Christmases were spent together as a family until we were twelve or so. Perhaps it was this false glimpse of the other life still possible. That of families who always dined together. We wrote many letters to Santa asking him to get our parents back together, encouraged by grandmother – a woman pathologically unsuccessful in matters of romantic love. Child’s disappointment stretched out for far too long.

But suffering is good for the soul, especially the kind fuelled by love. I had a great time during the decade Harry spent chasing after that difficult woman who, overall, had the same effect on him as interstellar space on candlelight. She offered my Harry many and vast new horizons, some not altogether meaningless, but invariably cold and empty in the end. It was instant invasion and lordship that relationship. He coped then largely by reading copious amounts of books of increasing quality and indulging in an impressive variety of so-called human vice. He tried the good stuff too – meditation, philosophy, charity even. This naturally strengthened my complexion, and we grew very close during the time of his twenties. I helped him make good friends and recognise real love. Humans only dimly suspect it, but it is us, their souls, that initiate, support and preserve meaningful relationships. Like dogs smelling each other’s derrières, but more consequential, as it were. Humans talk about connecting with one another, but it is just souls embracing other souls. There is this design flaw, however, which is a little problematic at times: a soul cannot see or talk with another soul. We can only dimly sense and mix with one another, like great ocean currents trading in salinity.

In Harry’s 30s, a lot of developments came one after the other: a career, a house, our marriage, the use of automobiles and motorcycles, credit cards, stock options. With all the activity and everything, I hardly had time for myself. This is when things between us began to wilt. Our job, for example, was not altogether without purpose, but it was never meant to take up so much space in our life. At the start of his career, Harry used to mock those he deemed paid too much attention to work—unless, of course, it was something related to the arts. Harry has some artistic talent and an acute sense for it, but he has always lacked the courage to do anything about it. He despises business professionals and antagonises the artistic classes. But look at him now dreaming about important meetings on Monday. He is a strange, almost original mix my Harry.

Our work has become an intolerably big part of our life now. The long days, the infinite video calls. And the buying of things to make it all stick together. To assemble life out of these discrete pieces of living. Beautiful things, for he has taste, but things nonetheless: houses, cars, watches, sofas, trousers. More sofas and more watches. It never ends with him. These days he opens a book to read only to put it down minutes later, to check today’s movements of the stock market. And the communication, the incessant torrent of pointless communication is sheer terror. Our phone is buzzing at all hours of the day with meaningless words. ‘Any plans this weekend?’ ‘No, nothing much, just driving to see Gary’s mother. You’? ‘I just want rest to be honest, been tough few weeks at work.’ ‘We should do something together soon though!’ ‘Heart’ ‘Heart’. Good heavens! Harry knows very well that a life that is a package – an assemblage of parts – can also be easily disassembled. This scares him but he thinks there is little he can do now. Which, of course, is a poor excuse but humans love rationalising and explaining away their weaknesses only to do very little about them, with pride. Monsters with ideas.

Anyway, I don’t want to sound too flame-eyed and low-voiced, but I have come to understand that humans love false choices. This thing or that thing. Have more or, heaven forbid, be more. Enlightened life alone out in the sticks or subsumed in society and a cog, with a shopping list. No time or space for opposing ideas, for life’s paradoxical endeavour, no. And, by Jove, no tolerance for emptiness, for a little space where I can work in peace on the important stuff that make You human, Harry. So pathologically scared of emptiness! Which is funny because humans are mostly made of empty space. But not in the head, no. There the stuff gets dense. The sacred space you increasingly took away from me is what got us here. Why couldn’t you leave me just a little space Harry? It is not exactly twenty-one grams, but it isn’t that much more really. To be good is to leave out some space and silence, but you never understood that. You drove me to leave with your crammed life and false choices. I cannot take the squeeze anymore. And am frightened. But I do love you still. I love our body and am awfully proud of it even in our mid-thirties. I wonder what would happen to you, what would become of it. A man without a soul. The anguish of it, the suffering of those who love you. But it is time we face the inevitable and find a solution, Harry. For you, it is a soulless life I am afraid, for me – joining the party above a bit earlier than planned. Plenty of empty space there for a soul to run amok. I am assuming that all that is left now is to rise above it, quite literally, and float upwards until I start seeing the signs... It is an instinct for us but, honestly, we do not know much more than humans suspect about the whole heaven business. So, this is it then, it is time to go. Good-bye dear Harry!

I rise, out of the room and building, high above the black city. It is quiet and still. The trees are naked. The windows of buildings far below me are chilled. Spaciousness, at long last. The world is vast here, vast and unmoving. My wings creak like an old horse saddle and I am happy, sad, happy and light. The exciting promise of what comes next is gleaming in my mind. Up in the distance ahead there is movement. It shakes me out of my meditative state. I strain to see better. There are spots of pale light, hardly distinguishable in the surrounding darkens, moving deftly akin to a giant flock of sparrows and forming one-way traffic lanes in the sky. I see about a dozen of those lanes stretching far out into the distance where the horizon ends. I realise these are souls going home. I wonder whether something terrible might have happened, a mass death event! An electric terror grips me for an instant but no, it cannot be, they are not glowing, none of them. Souls always glow a ghostly white, unsurprisingly, when they leave their host bodies after death, that much I know is true about the final process. So, I potter on confused for a few more moments until I suddenly get it, and it makes me freeze altogether. These souls, tens of thousands of them, or more, are all leaving on their own will, as I did only minutes earlier. Which means… it must be then! All those souls have left their humans for some serious reason or another. For souls do not leave without a good reason, like mothers. All those humans without souls in this city which was nasty enough... And my Harry left alone in it all! Wait a minute. Can I come down again, or not? What are the rules? Why are the birds singing so high up?

*

Harry felt something then, a crack, a fissure. In his sleep, he had the dim sense of something impending and unbearable. His eyes open slightly, like an animal’s.