2003-06-03 - 9:34 p.m.

The Thermodynamics of Trust

The table is thick-grained and poorly stained, the work of an amateur handyman who needed an object on which to put newspapers and a centerpiece. Coarse wood and a lack of experience working from patterns freed it from modern, capitalistic furniture conventions; not only ugly, but too unstable to even merit membership in the coveted Crude, but Functional family. This table is all that stands between him and annihilation, and he traces the individual grains intently, from one side of the table to the other, a seismologist of trees. "Somewhere between the gently rounded lines," he thinks, "that compose this failure, a path through the faults can be found."

The centerpiece looms large in his thoughts, at home by the window where the obliviously cheerful sun still shines; artificial, the flowers submitted to her deft manipulation without complaint. The air has gone still in the hours since she left, though the window is open and the insects still buzz. His thoughts touch briefly on the woven-silk blossoms, and immediately their blooms are to blame for everything. The plastic flowers, it seems, were the soul of the house, and he knows that neither they nor he may never again know vibrant motion without her guiding, energetic touch.

She sat across from him some hours ago with a ghost of a smile, when he first began tracing the table in search of solace, and told him that she was leaving and why. Mariah Carey's Always Be My Baby may not be Bach, but it's what they sang to each other in times of trouble; the familiarity and sincerity, alone together in a room with trauma, always ended with tearful and heartfelt embraces. She heard him singing it one night, coming home and walking by his open window; blonde hair in his lap, an ocean adrift, the hand he used to comfort her just flotsam on this anonymous tide. His eyes had been closed, his mouth an unsteady ellipse opened in their song.

Her absence is keenly felt, clearly shaped; "..but I saw the ghost of a smile," he thought, to console himself in his chair while the recollection of her warmth faded from the table. "A ghost, at least, implies that there was once life." The sun, sole source of meaningful warmth, was setting. Had scattered disappointment like beams of failed light through the room on her way out. Had set and gone.

She waited until he dozed off, entered with stealth and tolerence, and left them to their foolish rest. Her two bags were never far from fully packed, and it took only a few minutes to rearrange the mind and reset priorities. She left the place that they had shared with a toothbrush, two bags, and a quiet look at the drowsing choice still resting across his familiar form.

She has black hair, ancestry unknown. She's leaning on her elbow against the doorframe of the entrance to her room at a cheap, stucco-walled motel. A truck-stop across the street draws fading business as the night moves inward and the windows are no longer bright enough to keep away awareness of the sun's departure. Her hair and her past are behind her and she always looks like she ought to be smoking, since her unoccupied right hand seems very much in need of doing something while her left arm supports her contemplative post, but there is no cigarette and there is no quick Bic click to start a smouldering thought-filled flame -- she doesn't smoke, after all.

Of these things he is certain, at home in his silent chair, cushioned behind regretful eyes: that she is somewhere, that she will begin again, and that her beginning will look as he has imagined it. That her form is thus, and her head is tilted so. The angle of her stings a smile, unbidden, to his lips, as does the un-bashful familiarity with which she studies passing strangers.

Eyes closed, he rises, and feels his way to the door. Opened, it allows him halfway outside, where he stops and leans. Somewhere she stands right here, looking at the sky. Seeing the day's blush fading to a more appropriately somber twilight blue over there to the west, above where her car used to park. His arm rests where her hip would be, and all doorways are the same in memories of love.

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