Maybe We're Too Old

Frank looked down at the page, hands trembling. He was close, he was so close. He writes, because it's all he can do.

I went out to the balcony today for the first time in months. Instead of my usual dull stare, I found myself truly looking, like I knew you often did.

It was where you’d write your magic words. You told me it was where I too should have been inspired; although honestly I never did see what you meant.

All I could see was the dingy, repetitive skyline of Normandy, with the gradually growing buildings made of pale, lifeless brick, alongside ruined, underfunded relics.

This followed by a largely uneventful ocean, surrounded by a leaden outline of England. The fog of the place meant I often couldn’t see the whiteness of the cliffs that lay before us, though you always tried to convince me that if we looked hard enough, we’d see them – Like a sort of deluded hope that all things impossible would once again be illuminated by a contrasting white.

The road below our window was a rushed cobble – though you’d habitually try to tell me that it was charming; a fruitful reminder of the many hands that had assembled the many bricks. You’d tell me a story behind each one, like every man was as interesting and as meaningful as the next.

Me, being ever the sceptic, would laugh at you, tell you that it was peasants; dirty, forgotten, disinterested people, who wouldn’t have cared if their names were attributed to their work or not; and you’d laugh back.

Any charm you’d convinced me of was gone now though and it all looked remarkably and undeniably grey. But as I looked up from the shambles of the specific area where we lived, I was finally struck with the beauty you so often made into art.

It was dusk when I at last decided to treat myself to air, though it was a melancholy thought. The sky was warm and purple, with off strikes of yellow that appeared to cascade from nowhere, like a drizzle of colour had been spilled ungraciously into the sky.

There was not another hint of anything orange; it remained exclusively blue from there out. It reminded me of your jeans, the expensive ones that you smothered in acrylic and then tore up, because you supposed you could use the rags for some reason or another. I regret now not listening to what you had said.

The colours had shifted the outlines of the buildings from a disruption to a calm reminder of others, standing out as I was, observing the same beauty. I didn’t even recognise the old brick or the alarming rate of change anymore, it merely humbled me.

My eyes darted down as the sound of a child running below the veranda struck me, a soft clicking of heels that were as excited as they ever could have been; perhaps there was a party. I called the child a she, though I wasn’t really sure who it could have been.

She’d run from the park; that park, darling! That park where we ate, where we sang and where you painted your cheapest, yet your finest, work. We had picnics there in the summer and then trudged through it come winter, and to think, it was but an expanse of grass.

I watched the trees for the longest time, they swayed carefully, solemnly almost; like they were themselves self-conscious of their animation.

Yet they continued to move, as if to say “if we can dance again, why can’t you? We didn’t choose to move like this, but we are entitled to it and so we do”, presenting to me little nods that perchance one day I could join them again.

I’d hastily stubbed out my Marlboro at that point, a harsh spin on my heel. Who was I to tell myself that I was permitted to join them again? Who was I to do anything at all? I was just a haze.

A dreary, gone haze that no one remembered anymore. I’ve become a hermit, sweetheart; a complete shadow of somebody who I used to aim for.

The room’s not changed at all. Still covered in both great and awful drawings, still smeared in gone off, cheap paint, still sinking of women’s perfume and cigarettes. A feeling struck me, like the room was moving with an essence of you, as if you could possibly still live here.

But you don’t, do you? You’re gone. Gone, gone and fucking gone – In a muddled, cluttered, shitty, dirty way.

I think to myself often now, is twenty eight too old for me too? Is it that now I understand because I long for the same destiny?

I only found your note a moment ago, it claimed love; and sadness. And I believe you. For once in my entire existence, I find myself believing you with no shadows of what society tells me I could feel.

And I’m sorry.

God forgive me.

His hands fumbled as the pencil slipped from them. Too numb, too bored to care. And as they say, that was that.