On Parting

She and I had run out of clever things to say to one another, so we started drinking whiskey. It was a smoky variety that would have made us cough while our eyes watered a year or two ago. Tonight, we drank in silence. The refrigerator was making too much noise, so we unplugged it. There are shades and varieties of silence within silence as we discovered. We swam around inside them, kicked our shoes off as if our feet were slippers and the silence was some deep underground river.  

I pictured myself at the bottom of a very dark well. It was like another bad book by Haruki Murakami. I was wondering when I’d be saved by her. I called up. I wanted her to let down her hair as if she were Rapunzel. But she’d cut it. All the women I knew were cutting their hair short. They didn’t want to save men who had fallen into wells. This struck me as having some deep metaphoric value, but I was also slightly drunk.

In the meantime, she’d moved to the window and was staring out at something. The moonlight was like a quilt lay gently over the mix of Pasplum and weeds. The trees were stretching their limbs up in the posture of saints in ecstasy. Everything around us was a metaphor. “My feet are cold,” she said, stepping from the window, breaking that aesthetically pleasing silence that had been growing up around us all evening. I could picture the two of us kneeling down, our hands grazing, an electric current, as we watched our silence grow. It was in that moment that I knew we were going to part.

The moment that we actually parted was on a lonely stretch of beach just off the 101. We were talking about communism and anarchy as if they were still viable things. I told her that I couldn’t live like this. “Couldn’t live like what?” she said.

“Fighting all the time, about ideas, it seems like a waste of time.”

She said that the world itself might just be an idea in the mind of an infinite creator. Or that it might be an idea in the mind of a video game creator. She told me that an idea existed that said we weren’t three dimensional beings, but projections from a place very far away in the universe. She told me that there was an idea that an infinite number of you and I’s were standing on that beach, having the very same conversation. There’s an idea….” She started.

But I cut her off, because I was very hungry. And I wanted so desperately to sleep. She drove down the highway without me, whatever version of her that was. The tide was out, and I could see a small harbor seal down by the water, waddling off the shore and slipping gracefully into the water. I turned to tell her that it was metaphorical or intently strange to watch an animal slip from land to sea with such ease, that if our ancestors hadn’t done the exact same in reverse that none of us would be here right now. But the sun had tucked behind a cloud, and the light was purple hued and strange. I could see now that the day had emptied of her. I walked towards the shore in a quiet and happy daze, desperately ready to feel the cool water slide over my wrists, to wake up.