Preview: existing

He paced back and forth in front of a haggard wooden bench.

The inscription on the plaque was in commemoration of a dear friend he once knew. He was restless now, finding himself as he did to be in the land of the living. The smell of Yorkshire puddings still hung in his nose like a butchered cow in an abattoir; the sound of laughter sticking in his ears, plugging the drench in silence.

'Come on, sit down, for god's sake,' she said. She had appeared on the bench and he found himself glaring at her like she was an annoying and unwanted fork in the road. His feet remained rooted in defiant alienation for some moments, and then his body folded into place beside her.

'Donald's just learned 'Ode to Joy' on piano. Come hear him play when you come back in, he so desperately wants to show you,' she said, smoothing the folds out of her skirt. He stared forwards. 'He's still pretty patchy but there's enough there.'

'Right,' he replied, disinterested.

At the now increasingly familiar reception of his emotional distance her shoulders dropped a little, and a sad melting ran through her arms. 'What's happened to you, dear?'

He scowled. Now that he was seated, he would have to sit through this.

She left a pause, then continued. 'I know it's hard. I...can't imagine what you're going through. But, we need you, still. I need you...and you just don't talk to me, you just touch. And you're just not here anymore. You're always working. And how long is this piece taking you? We've run into months now, haven't we? How is the editor allowing for such a late submission?'

A silence was needed to diffuse the verbal build up. He stood up. Perhaps he wasn't going to sit through this, after all.

He took out a cigarette and lit it. On the first exhale, turning slightly away, he said, 'I missed the deadline. By miles.'

She was stricken. Her hands broke apart in a gesture, like they were two upturned broken egg shells. 'What? Well, then, why? What are you working on?'

'I'm still working on it.'

'What??'

'I need to, okay?' He locked eyes with her, desolate. 'Don't you ever just do something, because you need to, for you? Even if it doesn't count for anything to anyone else, even if it means nothing? Do you have any idea how that feels?'

She opened her mouth to speak but her voice was ready before her mind was, and she had nothing. He waited, intent on her eyes. Then he saw a fade fall over those eyes he had held in gaze for so many years, and he turned away. It was enough. She didn't understand, and that was all that mattered.

There was quiet for a while as he lifted and dropped the smoke through the air, and she sat there empty and devoid of purpose. 'I don't like seeing you suffer like this,' she said, finally, and quietly.

'Yeah, well,' he spat, bitterly.

'I'm your wife.'

There was something about the implication of this that twisted something in him, and it was particularly excruciating.

'Don't you think I know that??' His body erupted into a violence of gestures and vocal tone. 'Don't you think I'm painfully aware of everything I have, everything that I'm supposed to feel, everything I'm supposed to be doing? And yet I don't want any of it. I don't want any of it, love, because I have come to hate living.

I remember you. I remember meeting you. I remember our wedding day. When I looked at you, there, when your eyes met mine for the first time, and we were stood there, the universe went black around you, because you were shining, you were the ultimate light for me, and you stood there like a beacon. And I knew I could navigate my life by you. Because what else is there, what else matters, when you have the light, the way? There surely could be nothing to overtake the intensity of you.

I thought on that day as I had so many times that you are the only person, nay, the only creature, to have a depth of presence in the world. All others lacked the dimension you did to me, in all ways. When I looked in your eyes for the first time I realised that up until then when I looked at people in the past, I had thought that they had eyes. I had seen in books and been taught as a baby how to recognise eyes, and that was my understanding of what they were, and they did not seem special to me. Just drab variations on other variations. But no, when I looked at you for the first time, I knew then, I had only ever seen coloured circles on the faces of humans, masquerading as eyes. When I looked at you, you had eyes. My god. There's nothing I wouldn't do to fall into the depths of your gaze; the complexity, intensity, density of feeling...blinding, all consuming. All encompassing. I knew then I had to find some way to negotiate a bond between our two bodies and our two minds because I could not bear to walk around in a world that had been made two dimensional and flat by the true nature of what experience could be.

There was a time when all that was wrong with me and the world could be nullified by the black cream that poured out of your eyes and into mine; you were my restoration to a peaceful, blissful nothing place where I and the world was solved in your eyes.

Darling I looked in your eyes three weeks ago and in the place of eyes you had coloured circles.'


He stared down the garden path after her; watched her delicate body crash through the side door, and, as it opened, felt the broken notes of 'Ode to Joy' wash over him. His hand felt about in his pocket for a cigarette.