tuesday

unknown

The ways she dumped were different each day. On Fridays I was her basketball, fiercely smashed into the ground, just to shoot right back into her arms. Or a boomerang she would throw as far as she could, so she always knew I would come back. On Saturdays she would ask me to sit down, look me in the eyes and say with a deep sigh that there just wasn't a future for us. That we were too different. It's not you it's me, or rather, it's not you or me, it's us. And on Sundays she cried, hungover on my bed, sobbing that she wasn't good enough for me, that I deserved someone better. And then there was the quiet day on Monday, when I took a time-out from our relationship and had a beer with my working mates and she would be at work, or at her place, wondering why I didn't call her. Then on Tuesdays things would be alright again.

That's why I knew it was really over when she dumped me on a Tuesday.

On Tuesdays she was normally normal. She was my sweet, laid back girl that would answer her phone and talk about her day when I called her. My best friend who would come over and watch TV and bring some snacks. That's why I loved her, her million different characters never failed to interest me. But now she was talking to me on the other side of the line in a thin, shaky voice, no tears, no swearing, just the words we can't go on like this, I'm sorry. And I felt like an idiot for not seeing it earlier. The rows, the tantrums, the tears, the swearing. But I had kept telling myself that this was what our relationship was supposed to be like, that we were supposed to be different to everybody else. Because she was different! She wasn't like anyone I had ever met before. So I had to sit down. And as I buried my face in the palms of my hands I started to think about her.

I thought about how I could never really figure her out, because at times she would lock her self up in her own little world, one I could never get access to. We could have been to the cinema and seen a film of her choice, and it could have been a sad one, or a fairy-tale with a beautiful ending. And she would be somewhere totally different when we left the picture house. She would still be in the movie, suffering together with the people in it, or with the shiny, happy people; the ones who got each other in the end, just enjoying the bliss, while I was back in reality, walking next to her on the rain soaked pavement. If some people have addictive personalities, she had a mesmerized personality. Plays, concerts, sometimes art, could just swash her off her feet and she lost all contact with the outer world and I lost all contact with her. I could sometimes find this mesmerization amusing, interesting, but lately it had got me feeling more and more left out. I found myself standing on the side of her snow bubble, knocking on the glass.

And I thought about her devotion to the music, her films, her books, her world , the crying, the mind games, the helplessness, the days she would be a blank battery, the days I would be a basketball. And I heard my friends voice. "She needs help."

Did she? Or would someone's help be the end of her the way I knew her? Was she broken and needed mending, or were everybody else just a little bit less alive?

And I thought about life before her, how my world used to be, what I used to be in to, what I used to think mattered. And I thought about how life would be after her. And my thoughts ran to how she made me see things from a different point of view, how I sometimes managed to see through the key hole to her galaxy, how tea tasted better when she sat opposite the dinner table telling me one of her stories, how times with her I then thought of as bad actually now seemed better than anything else I could ever see in the future without her. And my thoughts ran to her collar bones, her birthmarks, her ankles, her breasts, her belly button, the smell of her hair under the duvet and I though that I loved her, and I had to stand up, and I had to sit down again and I had to bring the telephone up to my ear only to put it down again, and I waited with my heart longing, impatiently, for Tuesday.

Sofia Capel