It was in the early hours of the morning, as it often is when one finds themselves in that odd state between the conscious and the unconscious where you cannot definitively say if reality is perhaps a dream and a dream is perhaps reality, that I took to morning paper in search of something that may reveal to me whether or not I had indeed woken or had simply deceived myself into believing it so.
Elliot was peacefully still in his cradle as I fingered the newspaper, almost disturbingly still for a child that found it amusing to never give me a moment of peace. I felt compelled to put down the accumulation of eye-catching articles about murder and mall openings to peer over the edge of his enclosure, quietly, almost nervously, whispering his name to make sure he was in fact still living. The gentle rise and fall of his yellow fleece cardigan gave me the solace to continue reading, filling my head with empty words that filled the heavy silence of the room that I was now so unaccustomed to.
It was summer, the time of year when children of school-going age play in the streets until nightfall when I can still hear the echoes of their laughter as I set Elliot down for his evening nap in the hopes that I may be able catch some rest. The summer was, for teachers such as myself, a time of humble hollowness in knowing that you will not feel needed until the fall. Of course I was needed, I was a mother, but still I felt humbled nonetheless for Elliot was not yet old enough to hold a conversation and I felt incredibly alone.
It was when I was seven months pregnant that my partner and I ended our relationship. I knew it had been well overdue and for the first month of solitude I remained in denial about my sadness. It wasn't as though things had ended badly between us, the separation was slow, gentle and mutual; maybe this was why I felt a lack of closure on both of our parts. It might have been preferable to announce to each other in a flash of fervour that we despised each other and simply wanted everything to be done with, but we didn't; we were still friends.
He had told me a thousand times how terrible he felt and how he wanted more than anything to be a part of our son's life, by a part I assume he was alluding to the four to eight hours he decided to give to his child every Sunday. If I would have known I would have to make small talk and cook super for the three of us, as if we were a loving family, on this day every week I would have tried to move away a long time ago. Pretending to be fine proved far worse than simply not being fine.
I was thankful for all that he did for Elliot nonetheless, the money he gave me to hire sitters and send him to daycare when I needed to be at work was more than I could have asked from him. Muffled laughter of those outside seemed to mock me, and I found myself chuckling at my own pathetic plight, knowing things could be far worse and I had simply become too self absorbed in my solitary confinement.
I hadn't had any friends for a long time now, or what seemed to me like a very long time. The company I kept in my youth was meaningless to me, a flock of people who were just as indifferent towards me as I was towards them. We had become very distant after a failed spring vacation in which I said some things that I possibly shouldn't have; nonetheless I knew all too well I had no fears of loosing them.
When I met my ex-partner about a year after graduating from university there was a time where I fell into comfortable complacency, one in which I felt I needed to fit into in order to continue to have a 'normal' existence. We met at an informal gathering of my mother's friends and acquaintances on her 60th birthday. He was the son of someone or other that knew someone or other that knew my aunt, and I suppose that to him I was the daughter of someone or other whose 60th birthday gathering it was who knew someone or other that knew his mother. There was something very alluring about the colloquial greetings and small talk that had evaded me for some time.
And that was how his mother who knew someone or other said to him how nice it might be if he found himself a nice girl, you know, like the one you were talking to at the informal gathering. How quaint. It all happened rather fast and it was all so charming and predictable the entire relationship seemed to blow past me as though I were in a wind tunnel of disinterested chatter.
I had always found it unbearable, how easily one can become attached to another, and not necessarily because they desired to do so. Life becomes a vast archive of people interlinked with places and conversations you never wished to partake in so quickly that there isn't a single way to prevent it. Before I knew it we had shared an apartment and both worked menial jobs and then decided one day that it was time to have a child.
It isn't that I regretted our relationship, it was the fact that I allowed myself to become so utterly passive. I had simply let life do as it pleased without ever interfering. And now I had Elliot, the single person in this world I had any meaningful connection to besides my mother, but she now lived about eight hours away from me. I felt absolutely alone.
Lately there had been one thing on my mind, something from years that had long since past in what felt like an entirely different lifetime; a series of events that had taken place far away from home and that permeated in my mind ever since. It was that one spring vacation, the one I had mentioned previously where I ended all ties with my so-called friends and embarked on something of a spiritual journey in the desert.
It was all so long ago and yet the memories came to me clear as crystal waters, and I felt as through I were drowning in them. That was four years ago, I was still a girl then, even though I was legally allowed to purchase alcohol, and I had indulged myself in self-absorption for a few fated days away from home. I had evidently lost all common sense in a fervour of passion for one man I hardly knew, I had abandoned everything and forgotten my own identity, though sometimes I believe it was only then that I truly found it.
Those days had passed like seconds and somehow now four years had passed and I found myself extremely nostalgic for being covered in dirt and not minding in the slightest. There was something about this day in particular that had made me so longing, maybe it was the dust particles in the air that hung silently like small pebbles in zero gravity. I suppose it must have been fate, that one word I despise with a passion, but there was no other explanation for what followed.
It was a knock at my door, three consecutive knocks, rather. Thumps on old wood at a time which I had never heard them before, making my stomach constrict and my heart race; Elliot continued to sleep peacefully. Maybe I had misheard them, maybe it was a knock at the neighbour's door, maybe there had been no knock at all and I was simply dreaming. Then there were three more, each louder and more hollow than the next, and I knew I was not mistaken.