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Time was an illusion, God was dead. So were they, for all intents and purposes. He was a slave to the old leather couch, she to the hospital; who were they? Ghosts of their former selves, but to each other, completely unrecognisable strangers who happened to still share a bed. Or were they just older, newer people, that didn’t have a place in each other’s lives anymore, and too scared to break free completely from the restraints of their pasts, instead holding onto the chains almost as tightly as they wanted to be free of them?
They didn’t know each other anymore. They didn’t want to know each other anymore. In the rare instances when they would touch, salt and pepper hair felt strange underneath hardened fingers, and the smell of dye would permeate the air from the bathroom in the warm June breeze. Age had caught up, finally slowing them down to a pace both had no choice but to comply with. For her, it was too slow. For him, much too fast. Always slightly out of sync with the rest of the world, yet working in tandem with each other. Early mornings would be met with late nights, and cigarette smog would be met with stale beer. They were now toxic, too familiar, too easy a target.
Her lambaste now fell on deaf ears, and she soon learned to just ignore him. He knew better than to respond, for he knew that it was his fault she was almost 50 and completely alone. He had made sure of that, he would recall with each sip of unknown alcohol, until he would fall asleep in front of the television at 4pm to reruns of an old show he once watched in the 90s. He dreamt of hospital wards and family and old cameras and strange little men. Sometimes of old churches or fish, but never of red.
It was always his cries that woke her at night, never her own. Evidence of her own sleepless nights or painfully brief naps in the form of dark circles or tear tracks would shine bleakly against pale skin in the cool over-the-sink bathroom light. He would still scream every now and then, but more often than not, he would just cry out a single word, over and over until even to her it had lost meaning. She had become completely desensitised to what was once a shared pain. Friends and families and careers were not even a distant memory, but a strange concept that was only whispered of and never by her. She had learned to block out the noise, but time and time again she found herself straining to catch glimpses of what she knew she could never have. Soon, the days became longer by choice. Hospital whites and blues became more and more like home, and the housemate became a stranger whom she still technically lived with.
He knew she thought he hadn’t noticed her pack her bags, but from his position on the balcony, a stubbed cigarette in one hand-one of hers- and a bottle in the other, every footstep around the carpeted living room was like thunder, and flashes of linoleum floors and the clicking of heels were brought to mind. All he could do was stare, as he always had, out towards the stars, as she turned her back once and for all, and closed the door with a soft click that shattered his eardrums. He could have stopped her, could have begged her, but it was her turn to run, and he knew that it wasn’t his place to tell her not to