Mark's Pages

February 6, 2003:

Spring. Tall boy runs up zigzag stairs, arrives breathless and laughing. A quick errand: dropping something off. "Come in for a sec." It's her sister's apartment.

Inside. A change, something's changed. He feels disoriented for a moment. What is it? There's a new smell. It's her smell. He looks around. Her belongings: books, clothes, stereo speakers. He understands, in the lightningfast flash of a synapse, quicker than a heartbeat. She lives here now. She's left her alcoholic lover and moved in with her sister.

There's more. It's more than that. He feels something. He feels... her. She's here, right now. He can feel her here. Where? He looks around. The door to the back stairs is unlocked. She's there right now, hiding, waiting for him to leave. She doesn't want him to see her.

Waiting in the car, three friends, doubleparked. He returns slowly, preoccupied. Unhappy. Takes the rear seat, passenger's side. Seems puzzled.

"What's the matter?", someone asks.

He's thoughtful. A little hesitant. Makes up his mind to tell the truth, then, tells it. "My ex-girlfriend, ex-best-friend, was there. She hid down the back stairs so that I wouldn't see her." He looks out the window, upset.

There's a silence that seems embarrassed. No-one's sure how to react to something so childish as hiding down the back stairs. There's an awkward pause, then someone asks, "How old is this woman?"

He thinks about it. Has to calculate the dates. "She's twenty-nine," he says.

There's another embarrassed pause. Then all three friends burst into derisive laughter, echoing and roiling inside the closed space in a way which he finds physically painful.

He's not laughing. He looks away, out the window, wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his sweatshirt.