Sweet Tooth [HS]

SIXTY NINE

Max could not feel her body. It was kind of like a melting feeling: skull into shoulders, shoulders into kneecaps. It was like her bones and her body parts and all the bits that held her together had turned to candle wax, all slow, sinking right down into her shoes. She looked down at her feet, wondering where the rest of her had gone.

Wondering where the world that she had lived in - where did it go?

It was like the sun had gone out, the moon had dimmed, like the galaxies were splitting apart in silence.

She felt like there was nothing left.

Her heart was broken, she knew that well enough. And this emptiness was so great that Max thought it might have been better to have died with her heart. But she had not.

She was alive, a ghost, withering away with each breath she took as she walked down the dark street.

After realising what had happened - that he had gone, that he had left her again - Max knew she could not stay another night in that glass house. Could not bare to step outside, out onto the patio where only a day before they had sipped fine wine and fruity cocktails and played childish games in the pool. She could hear their shrieking, cackling, belly-aching laughter as they splashed in the water, could still see an unfinished chess-game laying deserted by the poolside. And she could not wake up in that bed that still held the imprint of his body, that when she touched reminded her of waking up beside him in their last days of sunshine with the heat of him pressing into her as they forgot about the world around them.

It was so empty. Her footsteps echoed, even her breath carried - and it was stale and it was stagnant and she could not be there.

But she was not ready to go back to London, either. Because that meant her balcony and his ghost sitting beside her with his cigarettes still half-smoked in the ashtray. A memory of the way he would pull her feet onto his lap, stroking her skin as they talked or as they didn't talk as they watched the world slip away below them. And London meant the clothes he had not packed and were still flung around her room because she thought he was coming home with her again. It was his t-shirts that were crumpled on her bedroom floor, an unfolded laundry load that she would have to pick through to separate her clothes from his.

And it was the kitchen floor she had sort of died on that time, and it was the same tiles that had touched her back as he held her and told her he would never leave her again. And it was the bed that they made love on. It was where she woke up in the morning and she was too hot because he was on top of her, and it was her looking down and stroking his hair and looking at his human face and knowing and feeling in every fibre of her body that she loved this man and she would never leave him because she couldn't.

It was the place they had lived in and the place they had loved in. It was the memories of what they were and it was the reminder of what they weren't.

Max realised it was not home, because home was not a place, but simply an irrevocable condition. Bricks made out of skin and green, sparkling windows and an air that tasted like his lips.

That was home. He was home.

And so Max had no home anymore.

She supposed he did not love her enough. That maybe he never really had. And that maybe the reasons why he left did not matter - because if he had loved her, he would have found a way to stay.

She stopped still in the street. Walked into an alley way, bent over and threw up.

When she was done she leaned back against the dank wall, feeling herself getting swallowed up by the growing emptiness on her insides, that was slowly consuming her outsides. She looked down at her shoes again, reached her arms in front of her and wondered how it was that she could not feel her body - how her edges had become indistinct, rubbed away, how it felt like she was melting down into the ground.