SoMa Literary Review

Armor

By Kim Askew

One afternoon, warm for March, I picked him up at the train station and I told him that it was over. I told him he had to leave immediately. That I couldn’t try anymore. I was adamant and unfeeling. I wanted to slip out the open window and float up above the other cars, into the clouds and far away. He didn’t say a word at first. Then after the storm of tears, disbelief, anger, and then sullen retreat, he left to stay at his brother’s.

I’d worked up every ounce of my courage this time. I wanted it to really happen—to be final. No turning back. No martyrdom to someone else’s shroud of happiness or future plans. Pity would not deter me. The rules and the fear of breaking them would not deter me. Not another wasted day would go by that left me feeling resentful and resigned.

I’d worked myself into a warlike frenzy—a veritable medieval berserker rage—that steeled me. I truly felt I was going into battle—victory or death. After he left, I collapsed. Every bit of stubborn strength I’d reserved for getting through this left me in one long exhale as his SUV pulled out of the driveway. I barely made it to the bed before the power of movement or even tears disappeared. I lay there all that afternoon, evening, and into the late morning of the next day. At eleven my father called as if sensing that something had gone wrong. Hollow, I told him what happened and explained that I was completely incapable of even getting up to go to the bathroom. No savings, no other place to live, and no idea what to do about it. I couldn’t leave him and then expect him to go apartment hunting. If I didn’t move out now he’d be back and I didn’t want to think what might happen. Rallying, my parents put away their surprise and said they were on their way. I say surprise because for some reason I’d never told them about my problems. I guess I wanted them to believe I was happy. Maybe it helped me pretend that I was.

Within an hour and a half they’d arrived to help me find a place to live. I felt like I was a child again and it was such a relief to feel their unconditional love. I didn’t have to think.

I moved out before he came back and I refused to see him because I wanted him to understand that it wasn’t a whim. I didn’t want to have him on bended knee begging for me to return. I didn’t want to hear promises of the new life we’d lead, how everything would be different this time. I didn’t want flowers, or candy, or jewelry. I didn’t want the trip to Paris that he promised we’d take if only I’d come back and love him again. I wanted to be left alone to breathe.

I don’t know how and I don’t know what this says about me, but I never looked back. I never wondered what if…. I never cried over what I’d lost or over our irretrievable future. I never opened a photo album and stared fondly at his photo. I knew deep down that after two years of thinking I’d never be able get away from the mistake I’d made that I was going to treasure every single moment of my own. Each day would be a new day for me to make my own mistakes, feel my own pain, and nurture my own desires.

Loneliness was my friend. I sat with it in the dark hours before dawn when the transvestite bars on either side of my downtown apartment let out to shrieks, catcalls, and hoarse renderings of “Like A Virgin.” When the prostitutes called out to their potential customers and the ambulance sirens blared on their way to put out the fire in the nearby crack house, I lay awake listening to my own heart beat and feeling the salty tears as they ran down my face and neck. Loneliness is the best companion when it follows fetid complacency and the wants and needs of another feeding on your soul day in and day out.

After several months had gone by I saw him a few times. I felt that we should be friends. That’s what he said he wanted and I thought I owed him that much. One evening after we’d gone to dinner and he’d tried once again to convince me that I was mistaken—that we were meant to be—I said goodbye and told him that we shouldn’t see each other again. He grabbed my arm as I opened the car door. He gripped it tight and wouldn’t let go. I recoiled, struggling to free my arm from his iron grasp, and once I’d unclasped myself I ran into the house without looking back.

For a year or so after it ended, I dreamt often that he was walking away. His back was to me and his arms were shriveling up and his feet morphing into flippers as he withdrew hobbling into the distance. As I watched I would cry with great sadness at the physical manifestation of the pain I’d inflicted on him. What I’d done to him by not returning his love. When I awoke I felt dark, but free.

Kim Askew is a San Francisco-based writer. Her work appears in Fabula Magazine, About.com, and on her own website KimSaid.com.