Clothes littered the blunt blue carpet, a muddled mess of a rainbow. The chaos contrasted sharply with its dull surroundings, which had been rendered dim and grey in the eyes of the apartment’s – now lone – occupant. He had no care for the disorder; he had too much to sort out in his own head to spare a worry for things like a clean floor.
As he slumped at the small wooden kitchen table, his eyes drifted from the unopened envelope fisted tightly in his hand to the chair across from him. With each glance at the empty seat, he almost expected to see Beth, smiling toothily and twirling a strand of hay-yellow hair around her finger, ready to taunt him for thinking she had actually left.
The seat remained empty.
His chest tightened, and he forced his eyes back to the envelope. The paper had crumpled in his grip. Nothing marred the happy curls of his name– no tears or shaky, unsure hands, not even the tension radiating from his fingers seemed to do damage to the flourished scribble. With a weary sigh, he dropped the envelope onto the table. Heaving himself out of the seat took more than the usual effort; the knowledge hanging over his head, along with the guilt that pressed heavily on his shoulders weighed him down so much that he almost wanted to give in and fall to the ground, never to get back up again.
Once, twice, he opened his mouth, but he couldn’t force any words out, knowing that they had no longer had other ears to fall upon. Instead, he could only manage soft, choking breaths that echoed painfully in the stale silence, silence that had once barely existed.
Leaving the unopened letter on the table, he walked blindly into the bedroom. He cast his eyes about, but the disarray didn’t bother him much; it never had before. When she had packed up her things, Beth had thrown everything about in her usual fashion, he supposed. He could only guess on that point, considering she had vanished before he had come home from work, leaving him to blindly stumble upon the destruction she had left behind. Every physical trace of her had disappeared, save for the lingering scent of her vanilla body spray and the pictures on the dresser.
The longer he stood there – a couple of his t-shirts that had been casualties in her swift escape trampled beneath his feet – the more the light shining in from the window above the bed’s headboard gave way to the shadows of the night sky, without even a sprinkle of stars to brighten it. As he stared at the destruction of what used to be their shared space, his vision filled with her, memories of her. All too easily, he remembered her as she braced one leg on the bed, bent at the knee, as she rubbed lotion into her tan, freckled skin; as she twirled about in a new blue day dress only to stumble into the corner of the nightstand, laughing uproariously; as she threw her hands up in frustration as her forehead wrinkled, her angry shouts shaking the air with their hostility.
His lips pursed. The first flashes of resentment sparked in his eyes. With grim intent, he strode over to the kitchen counter, where he had left his phone after finding her letter. He punched the digits of her number on the screen with barely controlled fury, then waited. To his surprise, she picked up – it would have been much more her style to avoid him. Her voice was soft, remorseful; but he could sense no regret.
“Hayden–”
“What the actual fuck, Beth?”
Silence descended from the other end.
“What brought this on?” he demanded, his voice rising with his rage.
Quietly, she asked, “Did you…did you read my letter?”
For a moment, the sound of her voice calmed him, as it was apt to; the sweet sound reminded him of ice clinking in a glass of lemonade on a hot summer day, of crickets chirping merrily from their grassy hiding spots.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Well, why not? Weren’t you curious? Didn’t you want to know? What about answers?”
Her words shattered the illusion of calm that her voice had created. “What do you mean ‘answers’? I don’t want ‘answers’.”
‘Then what do you want? We can’t get back together!” It was as if the ice had melted, the glass had cracked, the crickets had been stomped on and the grass had turned a lifeless brown. In that moment, he didn’t know what he wanted, what he had hoped to gain by calling her. However, he did know what he didn’t want, and would never want again.
“Get back together?” he barked out a laugh, the sound bitter. “I’d rather die than be with you, Beth.”
He hung up.
A lighter rested next to the vitamin jar on one end of the counter, close at hand for a quick smoke after a meal. Reaching over with a stretch, he swiped it up and took off for the bedroom. Once the dresser, covered in a myriad of frames that held some of his best memories with Beth, was in front of him, he dropped his phone. It fell soundlessly to the carpet as he slipped the lighter in the back pocket of his jeans. With both arms, he managed to pick up the entire collection of pictures. No emotion registered on his face as he carried them back into the kitchen, dumped them in the tin trash bin.
In a moment he had the lighter out, its flame glowing an orangey red. His brows drew together in concentration as he lowered it to the bin. Only when the wooden frames combusted, and the photos began to singe and curl black around the edges behind the quickly blackening glass did the hollowness in his chest ease up.
He refused to allow her to have a place in his memory, this girl who had betrayed him. Soon, he would only have memories of memories of her.
kaylalenting 