Words and Music

Heartbreak Girl

Heartbreak Girl » 5 Seconds of Summer

"I know someday it's gonna happen."

How different is a year and a day when they pass all the same?

He lives a time traveler these days, caught in a time loop of twenty-four hours, going through the same iteration. No matter how hard he tries, this equation leaps off his realm of calculations, even as a retired mathematician, proving he doesn't have the science to pull out of this dismal situation.

However, today is meteorologically different.

He has his eyes closed yet is aware of the pitter-patter of the rain hitting the window. It's loud and messy, as the thoughts in the back of his mind. Finally, realizing he can't stay in bed any longer, he opens his eyes.

Good morning.

He lifts his frail frame off the bed and, after a breath, tidies his side of the sheets and straightens the pillow, as always, the way she did; he strips out of his sleepwear and carefully folds them, neatly placing them on the bed's edge as yesterday; then, deliberately wears his bathrobe.

He drifts into their small kitchen; it is very dark, and even as he slides the linen curtain aside, the light barely filters through the clouds into the house. On the kitchen table is the jug of orange squash forgotten last night. After stowing it in the refrigerator, he boils the kettle for his inevitable morning tea and fetches the slightly damp newspaper off the porch.

Then, religiously preparing and straining the tea into his cup, he settles on the kitchen table.

Monday, May 14, 2007

He grimaces at the newspaper; his perfect tea doesn't taste right, and he picks up the pen resting on the windowsill, skipping to the Arts section of the print in hopes solving the Daily Sudoku will make him feel OK.

He wasn't fond of the number puzzle—he considered numbers practicality, something you solve because you need the result, not something you play with for pleasure—but his wife is. He remembers one of their mundane mornings, where she explained the concept to him, sipping tea opposite this kitchen table, a lilt of amusement in her voice: This isn't a "number" puzzle, Johnny. You're not figuring out any mathematical results here.

He finishes the sudoku in under two minutes and looks over the half wall where his wife, by the flower vase, offers her sweet, crooked smile. Well, a new record, eh?

But his triumph dulls when the knowledge that the sudoku is identical to yesterday's settles; the very same patterns. Now that the moron responsible for this bit in the daily screwed up and messed up his mood further, he downs the remnants of now cold tea and cleans up the kitchen.

On his way to the bathroom, he glimpses his smiling wife in his periphery again.

The first time she caught his eyes, in 1959, it wasn't love at first sight, only a quiet curiosity for his heart. She accidentally swept him off his feet at the local ice rink, a light-hearted tease among their friends even now. She was a tangent moment that he never imagined entering the circle of his life. But she did. Two years later, they met again at his former Yale professor's son's wedding. Then, it was only a matter of time before she made him question if he had ever been in love.

I suppose... forty-five years.

He braces his hand on the tiled wall, staring at the wedding band; the water droplets slide off the metal, a little tarnished yet still as golden as the day she first put it on his finger.