Day 255 - Resurfacing - Chapter 2.2 - (1069 words)

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RESURFACING

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 2.2

Which is the best time to leave. All hope is lost, gone and otherwise moved on, so should I.

I turn my back on her and I half expect the cliché to be hurled at my retreating self, but where indignation had railed moments before there was a wilted futility in it's bed. All the rage and the tirades, the emotions and bodily fluids, the gravity and the weariness of it all were all gone with me out that door.

“I hope you're happy.” Came the last words I would hear her speak to me. There is a sincerity, maybe a desperately angled sincerity but still there to be uncovered and aroused by the light of day.

“I hope so too.” I say before I know that my mouth was even working, but I added it in all honesty and truth, the cap to our final conversation. I assume it will be, it is our final one. Any future correspondence would likely be litigious in nature, conducted with the prophylaxis of legal representation, or no contest court dealings.

If we have truly let go.

An hour later and the hotel room is mine, the key discarded with none of the deference that it deserved, it may as well have been a sore or a tumour for what it represented, the loss and the displacement. Not that I had the luxury of feeling anything near what it could have meant as it was the consequence of my own choices, and the first step in a journey that would be sealed, locked in with hotel keys and room safes all the way to where she would be.

Waiting? Wanting?

Who knew, I certainly did not. It was a destination more than a journey, and the leaving was the first step, the journey an interminable wait before I got what I needed. What I wanted. The things I need are transient at best, money and passport are pretty much the only essentials. Everything else can be acquired, procured and are mere logistics of the journey. Ballast.

The room I have is cream, an off white that has strayed from the purity and cleanliness of the antiseptic parent shade. This is below, below the standards of acclimatisation I have achieved, below the level I have set for my life until now, below the gradients of stars that the website suggested were appropriate for the price I was paying.

If she was to change her mind and come looking for me? My wife, my ex-wife if I am honest about her, then she would never have thought to have checked a place like this. It is out of character, it actually is so far away from me that she would not see me here unless I was standing in her line of sight. This was acceptably unacceptable as a ruse went, clean enough to not tempt fate when travelling, but not nice enough to allow me more than a cursory rest before my flight on the next morning.

She might come looking, she might even come looking very soon. Though I doubt it, I doubt it would collapse, the house of emotional cards she boxes herself in with. She would be shoring up her defences, not knocking them down. She would need time to process and to develop a new opinion, one of her own uninfluenced by me or the reactions I would be setting in her today. She would talk herself in to and out of so many positions in the next few days that it was not going to be easy to leap at one and then execute that by tracking me down.

So I put myself out of her misery, out of harms way and out of the usual patterns that a determined detective may chase down as leads to my location. When she moved to take action, when she finally got herself to that point? I would be gone and in the air, potentially halfway to the place where I needed to be. No stopover on the road to destiny for us.

Really where would you go to take a break when what you need and want is so close? Singapore, Hong Kong, San Francisco? Which of these would be more than a distraction? Airports and tourist traps that provide food and commodities that I don't need and with no one to buy for, what would be the point?

The sooner I got to the place I needed to be the better I was going to be. Nothing but carry on, no duty free allowances and no baggage.

No baggage? Ok apparently my psyche has a sense of humour after all. The idea that I was not carrying baggage was laughable, I knew and my ex-wife knew it too. That baggage had followed me everywhere and had constantly made it's presence felt. If only I had the foresight to have carry on to the wedding, the one where I meant I do, but failed in my promise through blind ignorance. Perhaps if that baggage had been hidden, ignored or maybe re-routed to the wrong destination? What would this picture look like now?

Would we be happy? Would I be content or would I be empty?

Hard to know for sure, because the things that would pre-empt that feeling were already here. Guessing what your future could have been was a futile exercise. Most people wanted to suppose what they think their life SHOULD have been like, not what it COULD have been. It is like having a meal, a heavy and rich one and then while still sated and full to the point of gluttonous excess, trying to write a shopping list for your groceries the next week.

I could speculate but it would be an uneducated guess, and it would waste time and give hope to anyone mad enough to listen or care about what could happen next.

Really, only one thing was going to happen next, I would be on that plane and I would be on my way to her. The memory or the reality, neither changed the fact that the flight awaited me. So sealed in an unexpected room, under an assumed name with borrowed time I consume room service meals made from things I do not enjoy eating.

This is hiding done right. She was good at this