Moving, Standing Still

“Don’t ever leave me.”

And even as I tucked the last of my things into the suitcase, brutalizing my own molars and smearing away the tears with the heel of my hand, even as I sat on the stubborn thing to get it closed, even as I noticed the overlooked and recently hand-washed pair of panties drying on the towel rail, I had to laugh.

Leave him. How the fuck could I ever leave him?

It was just too tempting to pitch my bottle of perfume at the mirror and watch the white-tiled hygienic world spider into fragments. I left the bathroom a sweet-smelling war zone.

But there was no getting the smell of him out of my pores. No showering off his sweat or his saliva. No excising the skin that had felt the weight of his touch or the heat of his breath.

I could have come and left and come and left a thousand times and never got the address right. Never rung the right bell. Never graced the welcome mat. And still not have left him.

I was just one big open sore wandering the earth, looking for someone with enough balls to use the steel wool necessary to debride the fucking wound I’d become. And who in their right mind would be stupid enough stomach that?

Leave him.

What did that even mean? When I knew that by some awful quirk of nature, my receptors would tolerate no one else’s thumbprint on my forehead? Like the mark of some lesser Cain?

And I knew it all far too late. Not in the flush of youth when the universe spun so easily on its axis for love. Not in the ripened time of serene generosity or patient exploration. Once the doors had been bolted and the shutters drawn down and the home fires stoked up to ease our creaking bones.

I called down to the front desk and copped to my bout of temper. “You’ve got my card,” I said. But no. They had to send someone up to check on the damage. A big, meaty red-headed man arrived and tutted at the broken glass.

“You slip?” he asked.

“Something like that.”

He eyed me like a bouncer who’d seen one too many drunken cataclysms, until he realized that I wasn’t drunk, then his face softened. “Boyfriend trouble? Pretty lady like you?”

Jesus but they do train them well, I thought. Because what he really meant to say was that he’d seen a lot of pieces of roadkill just like me. The first thing they’d taught him in conflict resolution class was that flattery works so much better than confrontation.

“I apologize for the trouble. Just put it on my card, please.”

He glanced at my luggage. “Want some help with those?”

“No. I’m good.”

Walking down the endless silent hallway, I listened to my suitcase wheels purr love poems into the geometric wall-to-wall. Numbered doors flashed by in my peripheral vision. Behind each, I imagined a possible stillborn past. Maybe, had I just picked another room with a luckier number, things would have been different.

Leave him.

In the mirrored elevator, I shared endless recursive reflections with a deeply tanned couple of indeterminate age who held hands like lovers and smelled of cocoa butter.  Sadly, I’d already killed my last bottle of perfume. But in the sonic purgatory of the muzak, I mused that, had the floor of the car suddenly partially collapsed, he’d have never be able to save her; she’d have slipped through his grasp, and what good would all that SPF 50 have done her then? The bottom didn’t fall out of the elevator. It glided to a stately stop in the lobby, and we all lived.

On the way to the airport, the wizened Asian cab driver didn’t talk and I was grateful. I hadn’t planned on leaving my entrails behind in Las Vegas and I was fairly certain if I’d been forced to converse, I’d have disgorged the sort of saga all taxi drivers universally dread having to listen to while trapped in a speeding vehicle.

Leave him.

The attendant at the check-in counter wore lipstick in a violent shade of pink. I had to blink away a vision of them wrapped around a cock studded with razor blades. Thanking her, I pocketed my passport and the boarding card before she could smile. I didn’t want to see the aftermath.

The twilit interior of the aircraft cabin stank of bleak efficiency and stale food. The flight I had arrived on had been full of loud bravado and anticipatory twitterings. But the departure flight was a morgue-full of victims of ennui. I was obliged. The eerie blue runway lights blinked their inane little farewells in a Morse code that only airplanes understand. As we reached 30,000 feet my ears popped like a quiet gun going off in my head. The ice bobbing in the plastic tumbler full of vodka staunched the bleeding, temporarily.

Leave him?

How can you leave what you’ve never had?