Countdown #2

I bury my nose in my duvet. She bought me these sheets. I can’t shake that from my mind. She bought them. Even though my old ones were perfectly fine, she hated them. Too masculine. I’ve never understood how bedding can have a gender. She went to Tesco and bought a cheap set of sheets, pale pink in colour, adorned by sequinned butterflies.

“Do you like them?” she grinned.

I smiled, because I didn’t really care.

I try to remember how long I’ve been here, cocooned in a cocktail of my own sadness and questionable body odour. I hear the faint sound of the ticking clock from that TV show coming through the walls. The scrape of a bowl, the shuffle of a chair. I can almost see Dan eating cereal in his pants at 3 o’ clock in the afternoon. He’ll be in here in a bit. Knocking timidly on the door to bring food and to check that I’m not dead.

“You alright mate?”

I reply wordlessly, hoping he’ll interpret my gratitude through my guttural groans. He sighs and goes, leaving a bowl on my night stand.

When he’s gone, I sniff the sheets. They don’t smell of her anymore. Just me.

She never showed me how to use the washing machine.

Countdown Chronicles #1

Sometimes simple words hurt the most. When someone dances around the point you can tell that they’re worried about what they’re about to say. They actually still care a little bit about you. But when they come right out with it, like it’s the easiest thing in the world… I don’t know. When she said it, I didn’t really hear her. It was like she was asking me what I wanted for tea. She just plopped her keys down on the side and turned to me. Hands on hips.

And I’ve said it more times than I can count. On the sofa one night when she said that Nicolas Cage was her favourite actor and in the kitchen when she told me she didn’t really like drinking coffee that much. But it was a joke. Always a joke. And she’d always laugh.

I ask her to repeat it and she looks at me, with those grey eyes that used to be green, I’m sure of it. She sighs before leaving the room in a huff. I wait in the living room, staring at the door, my eyes slightly wandering back to the TV where Countdown is playing. Someone just got seven points. 

She’s back. She’s got her suitcase in her hand.

“I don’t love you anymore.”