this inevitability
“She had broken up with me long before this official end, this rhetorical and staged mess.”
“It is useless,” I thought, accepting defeat as I watched Clarice’s tears slide down her face, dramatic. A born dramatist. She wouldn’t pass the gentle back of her hand through the current of her flushed cheeks. She would show her tears as art, staging our breakup as a dignified and inevitable loss.
Clarice knew how to give weight to gestures, something I was never capable of. I was always good with words, but only in the conversations I had with myself. With a pen in hand and paper in front of me, there’s no debate I could lose. Surely, in this self-fulfilling writer’s world, I could win Clarice back if I wanted to, make her tears return to her tear ducts and anchor a disconcerting and intense love for me in her heart. I could, but I shouldn’t. I have to end things here again to have a double certainty and exorcise this inevitability.
“It is useless,” I thought, accepting defeat as I watched Clarice’s tears slide down her face, definitive. A definitive gesture of complete intention and total break. For months, she had been stripping pieces of me from herself, discarding them along the way. She had broken up with me long before this official end, this rhetorical and staged mess.
“I don’t know if I love you anymore. I’m not sure,” she said, her voice choked with sobs, and I remained seated in the car, leaning back on the seat, but tense, unable to find anything to say, oblivious to the possibility of a plea for mercy. I couldn’t look at her; I felt a certain discomfort. I didn’t hate her, but it was as if suddenly another person had taken the place of the Clarice I knew. As if inside her, for a time I couldn’t quite calculate, time and whatever circumstances had given birth to another woman. And this stranger, who had then suddenly decided to fully take over her body, caused me an inexplicable fear of change.
I believed we were merely in a drought, yet as a drought myself, I misjudged her: she was a rushing stream.
