The Rest of Her Life
It all started when she heard a noise while peeing. An organic defect maybe, a leaking pipe? She flushed.
The next day, she was flung from one crowd into another. In the evening, she walked home with a friend. He kept unusually close to her as they plowed through the deep streets; they ate together and fell into bed, limbs entwined. It felt good not to be alone, and she wasn’t stunned to hear a second tenor brushing its teeth in the morning. Nor was she surprised when the play was repeated the following night, and the night after, and so on for the rest of the week.
She asked no questions, neither of herself, nor of the world or the bathroom tiles (the noise had returned). She got used to the volcanic warmth of his breathing and the double heartbeat, sometimes major, sometimes minor, always in canon.
She didn’t see only him. At work, there were the colleagues, and sometimes she drove home with her mother who lived in a neighbouring town and arranged doctor’s appointments in the city when boredom and a sharp pain, stemming from a long ago sciatic nerve injury, crept up her spine. It was only after two weeks and, at first astonished and then hectic calculations, that she realized she hadn’t been alone in over a month.
She panicked.
You’re imagining things, she tried to convince herself, it’s pure coincidence. That’s how it works, when you let a new person into your life and are not completely devoid of social skills, just be glad you’re not Mrs Berger from upstairs — if she dies, people will only notice when it smells.
The next day was a Wednesday, and as she was sitting in her office, surrounded by bosses and co-workers and interns, people above her, people below her, nothing but people between and around her, she decided to try something.
“I’m going to the kitchen, does anyone need anything?” she called out in a low voice. “Oh yes, I need a tea, I’ve had a stomach ache all day, I just got my period last night, the first day’s always the worst, I’m so bloated you wouldn’t believe it…” her colleague went off, the one who never shared too little and always the most trivial thing, “I’ll come with you.” Well, Bianca is a tough case, she thought, that was predictable. Nothing to worry about. They shared a load of the kettle, one black tea and one bag of just-drink-this-and-forget-that-all-your-pain-stems-from-systemic-oppression-lime-blossom-camomile.
But then the defeats started to pile up: her mother took the car more often, her backside hurting again; she walked home with him through a shy rain (rain that doesn’t have the balls to fall properly, and goes on to lead a frustrating existence as humid mist on jackets and hair), ate cheese and grapes and told him about that Thoreau book she’d been reading and didn’t the concept of total solitude sound so utterly liberating? He said no.
He suggested they watch a movie together, she said she’d prefer to read, he then wanted that, too. She didn’t sleep well that night, his breathing grew louder and louder now, like an airplane approaching a thunderless summer night. He didn’t snore.
And she listened into the depth of the night and into the echo of these foreign exhalations and realized she got what she’d always wanted: She was no longer alone.
The only problem was: for the rest of her life.
