goodbye
I’m sitting on her broken couch, snow melting in between my toes inside of my puddle-drenched shoes. Lindsay is sitting to the right of me shivering inside her thin skin and crying so hard I think I see her heart lunging through her chest. She and I are both watching him, open stares of disbelief as he stumbles through a room he should know by heart by now. He’s picking up his belongings and tossing them into a disheveled plastic grocery bag. Books, CD’s, a silver watch, movies and games disappear like a magic as I sit and shake my head wondering what trick up his sleeve he is using to make himself vanish like this right before our very eyes.
I stretch my toes just to make sure I can still control them despite their numbness, to make sure I can still control something or anything at all, and I scratch futilely at an old stain in the sofa material, thinking to myself that there must be something else I could do. My brother is leaving again; at this point it seems the only direction he knows is away. He’s leaving me, his sister, and Lindsay, the girl I call sister. The girl he called lover just last night. Just last night he told me three months. This morning he told me two weeks. This afternoon he told me now. Yet I know this abruptness is nothing in comparison to the despair coiled around her heart as forever turned into never in just hours.
He is leaving and this is not even something we can mourn together. He’s standing there in the room in front of us, disentangling his things from ours and himself from our lives, but he’s already gone. Already gone and didn’t even say goodbye.
He said he was going to leave so there wouldn’t be any drama, but that’s bullshit. There will be plenty of drama; he just won’t be here to witness it. And now I’m thinking of how often his wife must have laid broken on a broken couch in her emptied apartment crying over his leaving just as Lindsay is now. Here I sit idling on the current of tension between them, useless as wallpaper peeling on the walls.
I’m trying to think of something brilliant and miraculous to say, something that will save--or at least spare--us all.
“Make sure you get all of my CD’s out of your car before you go.”
“I’m not leaving this very second. There will be time to get your shit.”
But that’s just your dwindling shadow lying to me now. For once, I know the truth. You, dear brother, are already gone.
I stretch my toes just to make sure I can still control them despite their numbness, to make sure I can still control something or anything at all, and I scratch futilely at an old stain in the sofa material, thinking to myself that there must be something else I could do. My brother is leaving again; at this point it seems the only direction he knows is away. He’s leaving me, his sister, and Lindsay, the girl I call sister. The girl he called lover just last night. Just last night he told me three months. This morning he told me two weeks. This afternoon he told me now. Yet I know this abruptness is nothing in comparison to the despair coiled around her heart as forever turned into never in just hours.
He is leaving and this is not even something we can mourn together. He’s standing there in the room in front of us, disentangling his things from ours and himself from our lives, but he’s already gone. Already gone and didn’t even say goodbye.
He said he was going to leave so there wouldn’t be any drama, but that’s bullshit. There will be plenty of drama; he just won’t be here to witness it. And now I’m thinking of how often his wife must have laid broken on a broken couch in her emptied apartment crying over his leaving just as Lindsay is now. Here I sit idling on the current of tension between them, useless as wallpaper peeling on the walls.
I’m trying to think of something brilliant and miraculous to say, something that will save--or at least spare--us all.
“Make sure you get all of my CD’s out of your car before you go.”
“I’m not leaving this very second. There will be time to get your shit.”
But that’s just your dwindling shadow lying to me now. For once, I know the truth. You, dear brother, are already gone.