Autumn Daze
The light fades from another crazy day, into a canopy of beige in the east and pink in the west. I sit under this sky and every inch of my body yearns for the freedom that being in that cloudless sky would afford. The garden bench is wet from a blanket of freshly fallen autumn leaves; I can feel the water seeping through my jeans and into my panties. Normally this would bother me, but not today.
I resume my gardening effort, and drag a rake half heartedly round the garden, collecting autumn in a blue plastic bin and banishing it from my garden. According to Mike this needs to be done. The buttons on my top have come undone and I can see my cleavage hanging over the piles of leaves as I pick them up, it is desperate to be noticed, by anyone. I have never seen the point of raking leaves, as I pull them from the flower beds, new leaves fall and my efforts become futile. I continue regardless, happy to be outside on this autumn evening. I feel like a child when I here the constant rustle and swoosh of the collecting leaves. I remember walking with my granddad and kicking the leaves in amusement. I remember how he told me that kicking leaves sounded like walking through a bowl of cornflakes. I remember taking Emma-lee out to do the same thing when she was a little girl. I saw the beautiful colours of those leaves reflected in her innocent and all too beautiful eyes.
When I’m done I feel a hint of remorse. I don’t want to be here scraping leaves, I would much rather be out in the world doing my thing. When I get itchy feet nothing much stops them. I sit inside, like a caged animal; I stare at that magnificent sky and the dying throes of the sun, expelling the most golden light I have ever seen, like a blanket of syrup over the world. Like a caged lion, I roar, I shout at Mike, I take his feelings, his oversensitivity’s and I chew them up with my big mouth. I am made to feel like the monster, but all I want is freedom. So bad I can taste it.
The night dissolves into a blurry drunken haze. Things have changed between us. I have asserted my needs; I have asserted my right to independence. He thinks I have changed; I walk differently, talk differently; behave differently. I think I have become myself, and I shouldn’t compromise that; no one should.
I tell him that I’m going to take up smoking again, he knows that I will, despite the fact that I have given up for two years as a pre-condition of our relationship. He makes me feel guilty for it, well and truly guilty, that I would be as selfish as to light up a cigarette and damage my body. I am well aware of the risks and I don’t care. I tell him so. He turns it around, like all men, changing history, distorting those fresh words into stale I don’t care about you’s. But that’s not what I said.
It’s not about the smoking. He knows he could cope. He knows that I would keep it from him as best I could and indeed already have. Its about something deeper, its about his fear of my independence. He thinks we should split up. I don’t argue, I just listen to him saying how selfish I am, and how much less attractive he finds me now. Perhaps he wanted me to join the WI and knit sweaters for orphans in Africa instead of actually going out there. He hates my dreams, he hates that I exclude him from everything.
I hate that I exclude him, but I hate that when I don’t, he makes a show about not wanting to be there, he makes me uncomfortable, because he’s too cold, or the chairs are too hard, or he doesn’t like someone or the place is too dirty, all things that I can cope with.
Lost in a reverie by bed time, I drag myself up the stairs, barely seeing each step through the copious amount of alcohol that I have drunk. The bed is cold. Mike is cold, and his arm hangs heavily around my stomach as we drift off to sleep. I dream of Alice in wonderland. And wake up with a hankering for hallucinogens, but can’t indulge.
The world is miserable. All the leaves I have gathered up have either blown back over the lawn or the tree has had a marathon shedding session. It’s been raining and the sky is overcast, not the beautiful day it was yesterday, I have awoken and found that the weather matches my mood. We don’t speak Mike and I, Its like yesterday has irrevocably come between us, It makes me sad, but I can feel the freedom, like an ache, getting closer...