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Walter put the cardboard box in the corner of the room. He would find a freezer to put it in for a while later. He knew someone who had one big enough somewhere, he was sure. For now, he wasn’t going to think about it. He wasn’t going to think about any of it. He didn’t want to. And if he didn’t want to, then he wasn’t going to.
He wasn’t going to think about how the year had spun around again, back onto the anniversary that he wasn’t going to think about, he wasn’t going to think about the ring sitting at the bottom of a river somewhere, growing tarnished and dirty. He wasn’t going to think about the knight in his pocket, still, after all this time, after refusing to go near chess ever since. It was still there.
He wasn’t going to think about the pigeon they had adopted together, the one they had only agreed to adopt because of how happy it made Walter. Freddie never liked animals much and Florence had wanted a dog. He wasn’t going to think about the pigeon. He was going to go for a walk. He never liked thinking about things.
Often, Florence wondered what happened to that pigeon, though she often forgot his name. She remembered Walter bringing it home, she remembered thinking how sudden it was. She was glad Walter took it. It was cute, but she was not going to be looking after that bird.
But time had passed and the world had moved on and sometimes she wondered about it. She didn’t think about the rest of it. Bangkok and her father and everything. She had no reason to. Nine years later, and she had other concerns. She had chess tournaments, she had new relationships, she had music and not just a new decade but a new century slowing barrelling towards her. She didn’t have the space to think about it. But dates got stuck in her head, and the anniversary always brought it back. And pigeons. No one else had ever seen pigeons the way Walter had.
She was happy now. She was never going to see them again, but she sometimes imagined telling them that. Look at me. Look how different I am now. Look how I've changed. I am happy, without you. Happier than I ever was. A kind of happy I never thought I would have. Look at all the things I am doing.
But that conversation would never happen. And she was trying to get over her bad habit of dwelling on sad things. She walked out the door, her life still fit in a single suitcase, she still could never manage to sit still.
Freddie loved to dwell on things. He did it all the time. He spent months with his hand hovering over the phone, tracing the numbers he had memorised.
The breakup had been hard on him, but not as explosive as it seemed to have been for the other two. There was a bit less baggage involved. And he and Walter had returned to their weirdly empty apartment, tried to make it work, tried to save the boat from sinking.
But anyone could tell that they were doomed. They spent a year trying to pretend things were fine. Dragging eachother deeper and deeper into the hell of their own creation. When Walter left, it had been a relief. He would have liked to keep the pigeon though.
He kept that phone, as time moved on, the phone he contemplated calling his mother from, the phone he got so close to typing Florence’s number into in full, before deleting it. He still thought about it.
He wondered what Florence would say, looking at him. At his weird, sad, chaos, With her sparkly chess career and shiny new instruments. He saw her in the news sometimes. He wondered if she knew that he was still digging the hole they had started together all those years ago. He wondered when she had realised that it was too late for him to ever stop.
Florence felt noise in her body. She felt rhythm in her feet, in her arms. in drumsticks and tapped onto table tops. She felt the vibrations of the train in her bones. She felt music in her lungs, she felt chess in her fingers. She kept herself moving. She tried not to stay in the same place for more than a handful of months. She liked it like this. She found someone else who did too.
Her fingers were often covered in rings, her eyes full of stars. She felt the earth breathe beneath her, she felt the sky rumble above her. She was in a different world now. She was glad. She had survived, she would continue to live, she felt warmth on her skin, she brushed hair and had her hair brushed, she felt cold fingers on her face, in her hand, seen their beautiful forms moving over guitar strings, across from her over the chess board.
This was the life she wanted. It wasn’t the one she thought she would have. It was the one she ended up with. And that was ok. It made no sense, but it was ok. Everything would be ok.
Freddie like to run, Freddie kept his old chess boards set up on a table, as clutter sprung up around them. He had never been able to clean the house on his own. Florence or Walter (mainly Florence) had always had to help him. And after years on his own, he still never managed to do it really. He cleaned a little bit. His house wasn’t unlivable (hopefully) but it was still very bad. He was too tired to do anything about it.
He still showed up for interviews sometimes. He talked about his questionable theories about the world and chess and life, and people liked to watch him, as he sank further down. He worked as a journalist still, quietly, trying to do as little as he could. It was fine. He didn’t need much.
He did need lights, attention, glamour, at least a little bit. He spent his whole life craving it. He didn’t need people, he decided, but even he knew he was lying to himself. Soon he circled back around to thinking about the telephone again. It had been their anniversary. He almost didn’t notice, but he did. He found an old, dusty feather on the floor, he found a ring left at the bottom of a clutter-filled drawer.
Walter didn’t like to think about Endings. Endings of a life, of a relationship, of a year, of a decade, of a century. Zooming out forever. He felt like he was at the end of the world. He felt like that a lot. It was almost comforting. Stability felt dangerous. At least this was more like where he belonged.
He didn’t like the image of the still pigeon, so different from how it had been before, so cold and stiff. He didn’t like the dread that he had felt before he noticed. He didn’t like that he could tell what was coming for him.
Sometimes when he got sad randomly, he worried that someone in the world had died, someone far away, and that grief had nowhere to go, so it went to him. He feared that would happen to him one day. That there would be no one left to remember him.
Sometimes he wondered if he was still tethered to them. If a passing sense of doom was because of something happening to them, out there, somewhere, in the chaotic world. He pushed that thought down when it came. He was too busy to think about those things.
He had to pick it up and put it away somewhere, those feelings, that still, small bird. He had to lie in the grass and let a day pass while he looked the other way. He wondered how much of his life he had lost that way.