A farewell

 

“I’ve deleted the photos from my phone.” he said, staring emotionlessly through me. As if I wasn’t there. “All of it.”

“Good” is what I say, but not what I mean. My heart aches for him.

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

He shifts his gaze - just a bit, and now he is really looking at me, but still, I know that he sees somebody else. That girl. The one. He does it from time to time. He looks at me, sees her. We smile. And it’s okay. He never really saw me, not for a single second, not for a simple heartbeat. His eyes were always clouded with her image. He never said it, at least not with words, but I’ve known it since the beginning. I was just a copy - and probably a very lousy one.

Now there is no smile. 

I wonder what happened to the one. 

He never really spoke about her, and I was not the one to ask questions. He still wasn’t really speaking about her now, but I could feel her presence beneath the words, or more like between them. There were photos being deleted and memories being thrown out for good. It could only be her.

But again, I was not the one to ask questions. 

“Sorry.” And I don’t know why do I say this, it sounds so empty and meaningless. It rolls off my tongue like a stone. But I do feel sorry for him. It’s just the word that feels somehow off.

“Yeah, me too.”

He looks away. His hands are shaking, and I sort of want to reach out and grab them, look him in the eye and say “stop it.”, but I obviously don’t. He is grieving, and I know better than taking that aways from him. The one must be dead - in one way or another, but she is obviously dead to him now. He came to me because he couldn’t go to anybody else. In some bitter ways I am also a one for him.

That night, I let him sleep on the couch. We don’t talk much: I give him a coffee and some painkillers when he mumbles about some kind of pain, and we both know it’s completely useless. He takes it and swallows them. I see nothing in his eyes.

His hands keep shaking the whole night and the following morning too, but right before I leave for work he reaches out, grabs my wrist and stops me.

In that moment, the shaking goes away.

He looks at me, sees her.

“Hanna.”

We don’t smile.

And it’s okay.