#5 and #6 She and He

#5 She

 

She sat in her darkened living room and knew herself to be lost.  She could say, without equivocation, that she had no idea why or how she got to the point that she was in.  She knew the road she needed to take to get out.  Almost as certainly as she knew the trail of disaster she would leave in her wake if she were to walk away.

So she sat in a dark room and waited.  She wondered daily what the hell it was going to take to make good enough okay.  What the hell was wrong with her that she couldn’t be happy with the things that everybody said should make her happy.  She simply couldn’t figure which was more disloyal; to stay when your heart wasn’t one hundred percent in it, or to call it quits on something just because it was less that perfect.

But these moments would come up, no matter how hard she tried not to let them happen, where the air became tense and uncomfortable with the things she wouldn’t say because they were unkind and the things he wouldn’t say because he always wanted to say the right thing and had no idea what it was she needed to hear.  And she couldn’t help but wonder, in those awkward spans, if there was really anything he could say to fix this part of her which she suspected was and had always been fundamentally flawed and irreparably broken.

She dropped her head into her hands and perched her elbows on her knees, thinking of silence.  Nothing but silence.

 

#6 He

 

His heart ached to make it better.  It drove him nuts that she wouldn’t just tell him what the problem was.  If she would just tell him what he was doing wrong, then he could stop.  He could make her happy.  And the truth of it was that he’d gotten himself so tangled up in her that he didn’t entirely feel like a man if he couldn’t make her happy.

If she would just look up at him and smile, thank him and slide her little body into his arms, he knew he would be happy.  Or, at least a lot happier than he was.  But she wouldn’t say, and that left him guessing.  Worried that the next thing he said was going to be the wrong thing to say, all the damn time.  As nervous as a virgin in a room full of cheerleaders.

And there was no use asking.  He had, one too many times, and it had become the wrong thing to say entirely.  He watched her fold herself up inside and put on a clueless face like some women put on makeup.  Her performance was flawless, impeccable.  Everything was fine.  Except that they both knew it was a lie.  Somedays it made him want to hit things.  He would walk around with his hands in fists, wishing he could just figure out how to break through that silence she was carrying.

Even though he asked himself, almost every day now, why the hell it was she didn’t leave, he didn’t once, not for a single moment, as himself why he stayed.  He stayed for all those times she would smile in that bright little way, or lean against him in a crowd, or moan his name with a quiet little whisper, and he felt like he was… real.  He wanted to be inside her.  Inside her heart, inside her mind, and inside her body as much as he possibly could because that had become… home.  In those moments, he felt he was no longer lost.

Category: 2011, Drama