Shy

Sunday

It isn't anything, anymore. The light, then the dimming, then the night. It doesn't add up to anything. Does not culminate, does not resolve. Each day is also not a day. But the nights are different. 

The nights are different, just as the days are indifferent. 

The night starts so much earlier, now, at this season. In this late season. It comes on before tiredness, and it shrinks everything around me, cling film, clinging to my throat, suffocating, muffling. The night is always the same. Always. Regret, anger, pain, endless turning. Perhaps things will be better on the left side, or on the right, or on my back. Perhaps things will be better with another cigarette. 

Out into the quiet courtyard. Damp leaves under slippers. The wrong footware, the wrong story, the wrong experience. None of this should be here. Stars always the same. The neighbour's cat with her stupid mewing. The chest hurting. The lungs aching. Now the turn to the door, again. Now the sound of closing. Always the sound of closing. What have I done? Who I have become? What has been done to me? What has become of me? 


Monday 

Fuck you. I say it out loud, as always. Fuck you, Alessia. Then will an apology - articulate in that mysterious, frustration of a space behind my eyes, the desire not to hate. Not to turn one so recently an object of love into an object of rage. Not to be complicit in this absurd, twisted, unjust and entirely just storyline. 

Ouch. Storyline. Remember her talking of our 'love story.' Consigning the very yesterday to 'cherished memories.' Ouch. Fuck you, Alessia. Fuck you. 


Tuesday

Now a shy man, am I not. After the long and gradual defeat, now a timid man. Now nothing to look at, nothing to ponder. Now someone to walk away from, not toward. 

So, shyly, wandering through the market stalls. Turn over courgettes in my fingers, pinching them for firmness. The man says something I take to mean 'they are not expensive.' I smile but he says it again, a stern look on his face. A woman next to me translates. 'He says you shouldn't touch the vegetables. For hygiene reasons.' Ah, I say. Mi dispiace. 

Cigarette and coffee, as always. Here, as in all places, where Alessia and I so recently sat together. Fumbling with phone, as always. Will it offer up something new? Will there be a notification from the great beyond, from the great above or below, from the future? Will there fuck. It screams silence at me. Screams silenced friendships. Screams lost loves, cold loves, forgotten loves. Screams and taunts about an old, shy man, touching up the vegetables. Old fat faded man. 

Now here, as night arrives again, shaving the hair from my head. A bold decision has been made. Everything must go. The hair falls away, a neofascist emerges. He has the same blue eyes and sad look and tired lines but, less beautiful still, more violently nothing. Why? It's the oddest thing. I didn't even stop to reason it out. Followed along, once the thought occurred, faithfully keeping track. All the tram lines of this city. All the poorly written plotlines. All the cruel inevitability. 

As usual, a cry starts. Some water in the eyes. Tries to push it out. Tries to make it real crying. As always, stops before it really gets started. Fades into nothing. Shy tears. 

You've ruined me. You've fucking killed me, he says into the mirror. We're not sure if he's addressing himself, or her. He's not sure, we think. We think he's not sure of anything anymore. 

Wouldn't he have said something about god, here, at this point? Wouldn't he have gone out into the world and found a female figure to fuck and fall at her feet? Not now. Not for the lack of wanting. Not for the lack of needing. But, not now, for the lack of being that man, that one from before. For being a lack. A walking lacking. A thing so sad but so lacking in substance that it cannot even cry. A thing so removed from the world, so incapable of making a mark, that it cannot register, not even here, in private, in its own tired spaces. 

So no religious allusions. No redemption arc. Endless night, and sorrow, and rage.