Mikey and the Chickadee

Chapter 19 - Part 1

My phone didn't make a sound all day, which was not entirely out of the ordinary. I didn't know whether to expect anything from Mikey. At work, I pushed back against this silence with indifference; already during the early-morning bus ride home I had cried at length, the front of my shirt no less than soaked in my sorrow. A meager assortment of riders had climbed on along the southbound stops, and I felt relief only because none came to sit near me.

It had been enough to carry me through the day. I made cheerful conversation with Jennifer about whose couch would be better-suited to our new living area. I slotted into my familiar productive groove and began clearing my desk of personal effects toward the end of the day.

I came home to a still, silent apartment and lay on my bed, the few items I had removed from the office spilling out around me. I looked at my phone, then placed it screen-down and scooted it across the blanket, over the edge. I heard it thud on the carpet below.

Mikey had fully respected my wish to be left alone, and maybe he wouldn't have tried to contact me anyway. If he was upset then he probably wanted to be left alone, too.

I lacked the self-control necessary to keep memories at a distance, and they flooded me now—most of all: his bare feet out on the sand, t-shirt clinging to the taut skin of his chest, black hair kicking up in the warm wind. I thought of the way his smile, in that moment, offered up the slightest amount of vacancy, awaiting fulfillment by wonders soon to arrive. This behavior was innocent. It did not calculate. He waited like a child would wait, because he understood that he could not know what mysteries these wonders would hold before their time.

With my head against the pillow, I looked up at the ceiling and started to cry again for the first time since early that morning. I imagined him alone now, wishing he could contact me but believing it to be something I didn't want. I remembered his plea, about how happy being together made him, and how he didn't want it to stop. He had described the feeling as a simple one, and he had been right.

But it didn't matter. I knew myself, and I knew what it would take for me to stay. Mikey was quick to admit to (and could probably have listed, had I asked) the things that scared him. I was frightened at least as much by other things, but they were more difficult to lay to paper, and whereas his fears were cause for me to stay, my own were the driving force in my departure.

The radio silence would last through the rest of the night. I got along by cooking dinner, then throwing myself into packing the apartment, chiseling out a significant portion of the job before I realized that if I continued at this rate, there would be nothing left to distract me on Thursday and Friday. I wanted to go to bed, but the hour was not suitably late and I knew I wouldn't sleep. I read until I could not focus anymore.

Whatever experience Mikey and I had shared, I stood just barely outside of it now. I had minimally but effectively decoupled myself from it. For a precious couple of minutes, I saw our relationship for that to which it amounted; it did not feel like a lifetime now, nor could it be compressed down to a single whirlwind day. Several weeks brought together two compatible people, each interested in the other, interesting to the other, to a decidedly extreme degree.

Objectivity was helpful now in a way, but I did not feel especially comforted by it, and I got the sense that it wasn't accessing something important—some overarching essence of what it was to be in the same place as him. After preparing for sleep I lay on my side, slightly off to the right portion of the bed. There was room left over for Mikey to lay facing me, and it was not hard to imagine it now. The feeling of assurance as his eyes looked deeply into mine from the other pillow, as our fingers fluttered lightly against one another's between us, was powerful and complete.

His absence and his silence now dug into me. I had no less than demanded it, and I knew with some amount of incredulity that if I did nothing, Mikey would be gone, silenced forever. I had asked for it, and there was no doubt in my mind that he would honor it. This truth rattled me; I tucked up my knees, pulling my feet close to the rest of my body, and remembered nothing else besides crying in prolonged, wrenching sobs until I fell asleep.