This is the first day of my life.
Glad I didn't die before I met you.
-Bright Eyes, First Day of My Life.
Walking up and down in front of her place wasn't fun.
Wrestling with his emotional guts wasn't any funner.
He'd gotten all this way on some moronic impulse so he really ought to knock at the door or
he really would just be a moron with an impulse.
Eventually he knocked at the door and he waited, and while he did he briefly looked up and around at the stars, thinking how the Universe didn't matter; it was unfathomable after all, and he needed answers.
Knock...
He knows that she realises, instinctively, that he is there.
He knows she wants to let him in.
He knows she wants him there and that she thinks she hates him.
He can even hear her inwardly yelling:
Go. Away.
And yet she opens the door.
And then indeed, there he is.
He saw right away that her eyes were sore.
He surmised she hadn't eaten all day from the faint odour of ketones, not that day or maybe even the day before; but even he sensed that this was not the moment to tell her it wasn't sexy to have empty breath.
Why was she so sad? Because of oestrogen ? A chemical that forced on a woman the urge to reproduce ? Did she love it, that urge to squeeze a parasite from your own body and then feed it and clothe it and even name it an perhaps, learn to like it ?
Right now she it seemed she hated that idea more than anything; but he knew that notion was crap.
He could see she was exhausted.
And her eyes were really sore.
She knows she looks and smells like crap, he said to himself; he visualised her staring in the mirror, in those sweatpants and that old jogging jacket, wondering if feeling physically disgusting made it all easier to deal with, and surmising that no, of course it didn't.
And suddenly he's aware that he is all platitudes and great advice : but he knows she thinks it is all his fault (possible) and he wonders if she she hates him or if she loves him ?
He wishes he didn't need his cane so maybe she could see further than a drug addict who should die in bus crashes ,instead of the young and the beautiful.
Then:
"Son of a bitch!".
He stands still in the face of her verbal release, and she continues.
"Why do you negate everything?"
And there's a pause the length of a lifetime.
And he replies almost imperceptibly and entirely truthfully:
"I don't know."
And then they are kissing, deeply, and fantastically, and he knows that he hears her whisper his name and breathe the words, Oh God! ... and then,a break, a moment of clarity and yet they are kissing again, and she is wrapping her arms around him - and - and -
It ends.
In a rare second of sensitivity, one he isn't sure he wanted to happen, he leaves.
It might have been enough for her, but it wasn't enough for him,and he can't pretend it was as he heads back to 221b, maybe to bash hell out of his piano (live with it, 221C!) or maybe just drink a bottle of Scotch, who cared anyway ?
He can feel himself growing older; turning to dust.
A/N
A companion piece to First Day of my Life
Thanks to Isabel for the idea cos this woukd never have been written otherwise !