Apple Pie

As I step through the reinforced door to my apartment, I feel in every way as the saying “wallowing in pity”. My apartment is a bleak place filled with nothing more than overflowing ashtrays and bottles of mustard. And that God-damned apple pie.

I flick on the light switch in the hallway and call out a tentative “Hello?” as if someone is going to answer me. Pathetic. Moronic. Idiotic.

The hallway mirror she insisted on keeping, despite its obvious likeness to one you would find in a crack den, reinforces the picture of my utterly pathetic state. Cheekbones so visible that I look like a survivor of some horrific plague-like disease. I am a ragged, albeit breathing corpse. But to what end? At the end of the day all I have left is that God-damned apple pie.

I tear my eyes from the mirror just to be met by a pile of ashes so big that the ashtray seems like a mere afterthought, a pathetic attempt to tame something gone so awry that there no longer exists even a flicker of hope.

I continue my slow walk towards the kitchen, and for the first time in months I am wearing shoes indoors; it is a mad, sorrow-fuelled defiance of her, one she does not deserve.

Inspired by a sudden whim I take a right instead, heading towards the bathroom. It is seashell-themed and makes me feel this maddening compulsion to get rid of this putrid smell of death, misery and angst. I turn the shower knob, strip myself of my rags and I quickly jump into the burning shower; as a man with a death wish dives off the Golden Gate Bridge. And even though the water is thumping against my ears, drowning out any potential sound, I can still hear my thoughts.

We met at her mother’s pastry shop on the thirteenth day after Christmas, four years ago. She was much too busy to notice me, directing the shop’s employees’ as a conductor directs as a symphony. But despite her not even acknowledging my existence, I went to the small south-end shop every day for months, three to be exact, never brave enough to woo her, let alone ask her out for a date. In the end she proved to be the bolder of the two of us, and our first date happened purely because of her initiative.

Time seemed endless and so did our passion and love. It seems sad and pitiful now, that we lived together in love and misery for two years, thinking of what ifs, but too scared, too lonely and too in love to act.

I step out of the shower, on to the freezing linoleum floor, find my boxers and glumly wonder if there is any point in getting dressed at all. I can feel the steam rising, my hair dripping and my nose running.

I have never felt better.

I feel that I no longer can procrastinate and figure, with long strides towards the kitchen, that this must be like ripping off a band aid, the faster the better.

There it sits, on the table, her God-damned apple pie. I can literally feel how my last energy reserves leave me, as I slump onto a chair staring at it. The only thing I have left of her is a pie. And suddenly, I cry.