When We Sold Ourselves Over The Record Store

von Tara | 0 Kommentare

To my beloved one,
Last year, when it was snowing outside, I almost wrote to you. Wondered… Are you still
smoking on the balcony? With your half-frozen fingers, the cigarette butts in the flowerpot
that has never seen a flower? Still have your records in those milk crates you never wanted to
replace? I wonder if you still talk in your sleep. You always said those strange, half-formed
words that made no sense, and I loved every second I got to listen to it. I still think about the
apartment above the record store.
I never felt safer than up there, with you.
Wood floors full of burn marks, a fridge that hummed like an old generator, and that tiny table
that always held at least three empty bottles with a candle.
The little bookstore down the street is closed now. Phil calls sometimes, but I never dare to
go, so I make up excuses. Appointments, dentist, headaches. I can’t. And I think he can’t too. I
think he doesn’t want to live in a city where you’re no longer there either.
Overall, I’m better off now than I was back then.
Only last year I had a bad relapse.
I was close to calling you in the middle of the night. I thought it must have been like when
you called and I didn’t answer… I didn’t. My finger hovered over the phone but eventually I
put it down.
So I never told you I was pregnant. But I swear you were the first person I thought of when I
found out. The guy just pulled it off. He was not a nice man.
He leaned in the doorway, breath heavy with beer, constantly talking about money he didn’t
have.
He said women like me should be grateful. Grateful for what, I still don’t know. He didn’t
even give me any money for it; he just left. I never saw him again. Just gone.
Door slammed. Then silence. And I was thinking of your past too when I curled up in the bed.
I wonder if you never told me either. What you really did when you were late. Cried for hours
in that thought. Cursed, killed and snitched in my thoughts again.
After that, it was over for me. I’d had enough.
I sat in the bathroom for an hour, staring at the test. It was raining, I remember; the drumming
of the water against the window. Your dumb, endlessly long, pretentious names for our neverborn children immediately flashed through my mind.
It wasn’t my fault I lost that job. That last case broke me, and everything started all over
again. You must know best how it feels.
I didn’t keep it.
I couldn’t.
Sometimes I dream I did, and a child with your eyes runs down the old stairs, laughing as if
nothing between us ever broke. Then I wake up, and it’s just me.
But in this life, it wasn’t meant to be.
Anyway, after you were gone, it was pretty uncomfortable up there. Our little kingdom of
cigarette butts, with its curtained windows to the market square and the crookedly stacked
books, cold and blue.
I didn’t keep it.
I packed everything into a box and moved to the other side of the country, just like you, from
what I’ve heard.
Don’t worry, it’s somewhere completely different.
Our paths won’t cross, and old wounds won’t reopen.
I couldn’t keep any of it.
Instead, I bought a used jacket at the old secondhand shop next to our former apartment and
wore it every day like armor.
I rode the bus into nowhere, just to keep moving. Sat by the window, watching the neon signs
flare up in the shop windows across the street and die again, pretending every flicker was
some kind of answer. Pretending that moving, just moving, could mean something. I couldn’t
keep any of it.
Now I’ve got a decent job, maybe soon the job of my dreams. Dream job meaning: better
salary, meetings, emails, a coffee machine in the kitchen. I’d be over the moon if I got it. But
if you made it too… well, that’d make the whole damn galaxy spin.
Some nights I still ride that bus, nowhere in particular, letting the city roll past, thinking of
you. And if you ever find yourself in a moment like that again, wherever you are, I hope you
know I’m only a heartbeat away, no matter how many miles stretch between us, waiting to
finally take the bus for one last time into the right direction. Riding, moving, pretending it all
was good for something