Caravellum

”Please don’t leave me.” she speaks, her voice catching in an exhausted plea. Her third-hand cuckoo clock croaks a wearied chime for six, but falls silent on the fifth. She bites her lip, trying to stop it from wobbling. I keep my eyes from hers; I am desperate not to look into those red-rimmed blues that scream everything she doesn’t know how to. I stare out the window at the last rays of the sunset as the dark clouds of tonight’s storm begin to gather.

“Why can’t we try again?” she asks. I feel, for a moment, as if this moment had been felt before. That feeling, like a tearing pull of a perforated mind, felt only on the periphery. We’ve spoken about this daily lately. Still, I struggle to place why it feels strange that I know what she’s about to say.

“It’s our anniversary.” she pleads.
“This isn’t working.” I say, a vapid response from a drum running empty on platitudes, still trying to cut our bonds without leaving her bleeding.
“But I love you.” comes the foretold reply. Five years of responding in kind – and another of merely echoing it – brings the words rising to my lips; a trained dog struggling against its new muzzle. I do not speak. The unnatural silence deafens and spreads into each of the nooks that we had shared in this place, broken only by the rumble of the breaking storm. I risk a glance at her face, forgetting myself. My heart wrenches, tears, and breaks into every piece as I watch her eyes search hopefully for some sign in mine. The tears well when she cannot find it; the rain falls in great drops from the clouds above. It takes up a steady beat upon the metal roof; a call to stay inside and find someone to be close to. It is not a night to be cold and alone through – not there ever was one – yet I know it is the dangerous call of a siren to return to the comfort that could come from those easy words. The path of least resistance that might bring me back to her: an animal track flattened by our passage through the wilds.

I want to say something – anything – to have her show her smile once more, radiating that pure joy. I want to hold her close and tell her that she’ll be okay. I know that I have been a coward, too terrified to commit yet too weak to cut her free. I had searched for ways to show her that I couldn’t give her what she wanted; make her see that she’d be better off without me. I had tried to wedge our relationship apart, spurring months of misguided attempts to fix problems that weren’t to be fixed. More tears and sometimes fury. I would sink with that sickening feeling that I hoped that she might leave me, and I wouldn’t have to live with the guilt of a relationship so sabotaged. But she loved me, in a way that perhaps nobody ever would, and I had ruined it.

“Please.” I struggle to keep my voice from breaking on the tides of my own mind. “Let me go.” We stand by the entrance now, her between me and the door. “Please.”
“Just tell me you love me, and it’ll be over.” The words once more spring to attention – that loyal hound abandoned as I claim no ownership of it. She knows that it is finished. She fiddles with her ring. “Then we’ll have to start over.”

The queasiness comes and leaves me in an instant. I do not recall where I had been, nor how I had sat down. The clouds are gathering for a stormy night, last rays of the sunset creeping into the room and resting upon her tear-dabbed cheeks as she sits across from me. The clock wheezes towards six; it falters at the fifth. Her hands clench upon the ring. She bites her lip. She sighs, filled with something of a sort between sadness and pity.
“Please don’t leave me.”