They think, in the end, that you merely tossed the mirror and left.
They're wrong--at least, you think they're wrong. But what do you know? Who are you to talk?
You don't even know who you are. Are you the wild, custard-making writer with not a penny to his name? The absentee ex-boyfriend faced suddenly with the prospect of fatherhood? The stoic deckhand? The forbidden lover? The walking contradiction? The chain-smoker? The cheat?
You are all and none; a chameleon. To assume a new role, you simply shuck off your precious identity and fling it out to sea with all the others.
You are, with a simple shift, rouge and pillar. It's exciting, for sure.
Why not rut Les's wife? Why not leave her 'soon as someone more arousing comes along? You could use a little fun anyhow.
But you digress; one grows tired of such cynical logic.
You often long to revisit once more the taste of custard and hot sauce and ketchup and Cathy. The scrape of gravel on bare sweaty skin, patterning the slick surfaces with abrasions. The hurried, businesslike absurdity of a 'quickie' against a brick wall. The thrill of an affair.
The resounding splash of a broken future hitting the water.
The dagger in your gut as someone framed for your fuck-ups pays the ultimate.
It's curious, how Cathy ended up underwater, like any other purely replaceable accessory to your life. Just another piece in the puzzle of Joe's Life.
And as you consider the slate-gray surface of your liquid treasure chest, you sometimes wish to join the fragments in their peaceful, waterlogged, endless contemplation of what went wrong?
You don't know very much at all.
It's a pretty good question.
END.