Places to be

I’m sat at the desk in the kitchen and he’s behind me, leaning into a corner. I’ve been thinking for a while about how we do this.

When I started it was a dumb fly-on-the-wall style thing. Look:

She sits at the kitchen table with a typewriter. Outside the sun is bleaching. A half-drunk coffee cools on the side. Some crumbs next to her hand. She is looking out through the window, but not at anything.

In the light and in the coffee and the mid morning daze…

The doorbell rings.

I…

She stops typing. She opens the door and an alsatian pushes past her leg into the house. A man is standing in front of her. Hairy, with wraparound sunglasses. Hands in his pockets. He probably has a leather jacket on, made of plants rather than leather.

His face doesn’t move, his eyes are hidden behind the glasses. She steps aside and motions for him to come in.

He leans on the kitchen wall. The dog pads its way back into the kitchen and sniffs her. She tickles his head and scratches his belly, then sits down.

I’m working, she says, just so you know.

She pulls the paper out of the typewriter and inserts a clean page.

But that felt all twee and weird. More like a short story than this live-in arrangement we have now. And anyway, since he’s arrived I’ve been so busy. We’ve had a lot of discussions. Acted out many scenes. I like his dog a lot. I have a cat, but she does her own thing. She knows my moods and respects my blind devotion to these people I sometimes show up with. She has her own loves to love.

In one of the scenes we tried, a woman turns up in an ambulance. Driving the ambulance, that is. I leave the door open and she walks in, bringing another dog.

After we chat all together for a while, maybe a couple of days, they get knives from the kitchen and stab me many times. I don’t die, and they don’t care whether I’m dead or not when they leave. I just bleed and hurt and crawl into the shower, where I wash away too much blood. In the morning, he comes back and finds me in the kitchen, on the floor again, acts like he wasn’t one of the people who stabbed me. Acts like he cares about the red staining my top. I don’t know where the ambulance went, but he says he’ll call one. I say not to.

But anyway… haha. Enough about scenes. I reckon we’ll get to that stuff later.

Hey, I say to him. Hey, so I’ve realised we can’t start here. We can’t start at the end, we have to go back and show them the nice times, make them live through the good so they can see how fucked up the bad is.

He looks in my direction, arms folded.

“That’s not exactly fair on me though is it?”

His dog, a big, scary, infinitely caring and friendly thing, sniffs my hand. He’s probably looking for the tennis ball.

What do you mean not fair on you? You enjoyed the past as well. You said.

“You already know my decision. There’s no point digging up the past and making things feel worse for both of us.”

Yeah but it wasn’t my decision. And it wasn’t our decision, was it?

I pet the dog.

“You ended any sense of us when you did what you did.”

Would you please stop being so much like him, it’s actually hurting me.

“How am I supposed to act?”

Like a figment of my imagination I’ve hired to portray him. Obviously. Have you ever looked behind your glasses? His eyes didn’t look like that.

“What have you done to my eyes?”

Don’t pretend to be freaked out by this.

He slowly kneels down, relaxing or retreating, and starts to feel behind the glasses at his eyes. The dog leaves my hand and pads over to him, looks up, maybe concerned, maybe curious.

You’re not going to be able to feel them that way, silly. Stop making the readers think I’m doing weird stuff to you. It’s you who’s a big part of the problem here.

“If we go back to the nice times, do I get my eyes back?”

They’re not your eyes, they’re his. And no.

He stops fussing with his eyes. Pets the dog, who relaxes and lies next to him on the floor. Pensive.

“If I don’t have his eyes, I don’t have his mind either.”

Yeah.

“Whose mind do I have then?”

You’ve got everything I know and believe about him, even a bunch of contradictory, confused and unfinished stuff, crammed into your skull and body.

“Oh.”

I did say you’re literally a figment of my imagination.

“Why are you acting like this is normal?”

Why are you not? Stop stalling for time, we have places to be.