All she heard was the shuffle, shuffle, shuffle of her own feet. Not that the night was silent. Not by a long shot. The music spilling from the dance clubs was far louder than any noise her ill-fitting pumps could produce. But she was so into her own head, her tumultuous thoughts that any sound generated outside herself just didn't register. And since it didn't register in her crazy busy brain, it simply didn't exist.

She knew that she should have been home hours ago. That instead of walking down this bustling sidewalk at midnight she should've been getting ready for bed. Brushing her teeth, washing the make-up from her face, brushing her long dark hair until it gleamed - not a stroke more, not a stroke less.

But being home tonight - Friday night - would do nothing but tear her apart, remind her yet again that he wasn't there anymore. No, better for her to walk about late at night where the people she didn't notice, the sounds she couldn't hear, could keep her company. Remind her she wasn't alone.

Once, a long time ago, she had been alone, without a companion. It didn't seem so bad then. Maybe because she was younger. Maybe because she had a roommate. Maybe because she had never before invested her years and her emotions and her thoughts in a relationship that had once been mutual, reciprocal.

The freshness, the starkness of her now aloneness had weighed heavily on her this past week. Everything she did echoed loudly in an apartment that had lost 175 pounds of human. Her sobbing, screaming, vomiting. Even her thoughts - of suicide, of self-mutilation, of revenge - seemed to reverberate in the apartment. Which was why she left.

She had driven over the hill, down Santa Monica Blvd and had miraculously found a parking space in the middle of West Hollywood night life. Taking it as an omen, she had taken the parking space in front of the clean, yet hole-in-the-wall restaurant next to Koontz Hardware. It had looked too busy, even for her mood on this night, so she opted to move along the sidewalk instead, listening to her shuffling feet and scowling at the shoes popping off her heels to drag on the cement before she brought her foot down again to slide the shoe back on.
- posted by Carol Elaine @ 5:36 PM 0 comments