Withdrawal
She wanders through artificial lamplight at night, sometimes, as empty as a drum, beating out mournful bass beats from a hole inside her. Sometimes she has to stop at a bench and light up a cigarette, the momentary flare lighting up her face and spreading warmth to her fingers. These are the nights when she can't sleep. The nights when she can only feel the cold sheets next to her, the nights when she wraps her arms around herself to stop the hole from growing.
She wonders where he is, how he is. If he's dead, even. And when she starts to cry, she lights up again, making shaky exhalations with tears falling out of a solitary place she doesn't like to visit often. He is the one who is always leaving now; she is the one he always leaves behind. She is used to running away, herself: she is the expert, the professional. But what do you do when you have been left? Where do you run then?
She watches the flickering screen of her TV in the dark, a screen with people always moving. She cannot see her life any more; it has drawn to a stop. A train run out of steam. She is unaware of time, the phone ringing, her empty fridge.
At work, she hungers to help the injured, the dying. She figures that keeping herself busy means less time spent alone in her apartment smoking her soul away. She's not sure she believes in souls, but if she had one, it'd be blackened with tar and clawed apart with self-hatred. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to smoke it away. Nevertheless, she is always the last one on the shift, always the first one to take on an extra shift. She works herself hard, too hard, and supervisors make note of her, worried of the shadows under her eyes eating away, but they have no time to take her aside, no time for quick words of counsel. She continues to grow skeletal, easier to fall apart.
She reads his letter often, but only behind closed curtains. She will not allow anyone to see how she collapses like a broken doll; she will make space for only herself between Misery's thighs. She has no capacity to note self-destruction as an unhelpful cure to pain anymore. It is only now that she sees she let herself get too vulnerable. She let him beat her heart about, whilst she kicked his around. Like schoolchildren they played games, where neither won because they both gave up. Timing laughed at them, made way for Loneliness to coo soothing words into their ears as they stood facing away from each other, arms folded.
She drinks alone in her apartment, and takes it in excess so that she drowns into blackness. When she begins drinking, she remembers him kissing her, holding her tight, watching her smoke her cigarettes. But then as the alcohol drowses her out, she remembers their arguments, and finding the ring that he never proposed to her with. And then all there is is black; black like the night and the tar in her lungs. Black, which comforts her, and makes her feel like she's dead.
She thinks about dying, a lot. About walking in front of a car or stealing drugs from the drug lockup at work. But it makes her think of him, of how strong he was, of how he got back on the right track. So she satiates herself with the knowledge that she'll probably fuck her insides up with the rate of smoking, drinking and not eating well that she keeps up. She feels raw, cut open, and angry. She should never have let this get so far. So that he could look close at her insides and notice the crap she couldn't hide. And then for him to walk away. She tried to sew herself up the first few times, tried to gather the sharp pieces up and glue them back into the way they were. But he walked away again. And that was when she gave up and hacked it all open. Now she feels like she is painting herself with black paint, as a warning to anyone who comes near – defunct, scarred, unhealthy. Do not touch.
Colleagues see her, wasting away. They gossip about the break-up, they gossip about how he left. No one knows the facts, and few dare to ask how she is. They have to strain their ears to hear a reply, emanating from the shadow of someone thought they used to know. "Fine," she chokes with charcoal embers in her throat. Her fingers grapple with a cigarette, and then she is gone.