Author's Chapter Notes:
I stole the title from Salinger's Franny and Zooey. It's actually a play on the title of Carson McCuller's novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I'm not sure if either of these things are relevant to the fic itself, but kind of maybe. Also, I believe in my heart of hearts that Pam listens to old school Mariah Carey often when alone.
One.
Groaning floorboards beneath his feet at three in the morning. Orange streetlights flooding his new, still empty living room. Faraway sounds (sirens, speeding cars, a barking dog) fill in the silence.
He stopped sleeping sometime late in May, finding that there were things behind his eyelids and hidden within his subconscious that he didn’t want to see anymore. Her, mostly, that night, the now impossible future in warm, bright colors being torn away when morning came. So he stopped closing his eyes and he stopped dreaming. He lauded himself for thinking of such a brilliant solution to his problem.
He takes laps around his apartment. Circles through the kitchen into the living room through the bedroom and back again. It takes twenty-three seconds at a walking pace. He picks out landmarks such as the phone on the wall in the kitchen, the end table in the living room, and the nick on the frame of his bedroom door. Things he’s sure will always be right where they’re supposed to be.
He reads books he always meant to read, but the words don’t quite ever seem to make it to his brain . Just black ink on off white pages. But he likes moving his eyes over the curve of the letters. He likes the way sentences are like buildings with a foundation and a structure, windows and doors.
He writes letters he isn’t going to send to her. About past mistakes and regrets and how if he could, he would go back three years and tell her he loved her the first time he ever even thought it. How things would be different and better now. He puts them in envelopes, prints her name in big capital letters across the front, shoves them into a drawer and pretends to forget.
Currently, he’s pacing the floor on his 23rd night of not sleeping, of self induced insomnia, with his eyelashes pulling like weights because it’s the only way he can see her now.
***
Two.
Her life now boils down to waiting for a beep. The beep that means her dinner is ready for her to eat on her couch while watching TV. She waits four and a half minutes for the beep to tell her it‘s dinnertime. And she sort of misses making a real dinner. It was rare that she cooked for Roy, but she misses standing over boiling pots and checking things in the oven. She misses feeling like she accomplished something while eating dinner. Now she presses buttons and waits for the beep.
The light lasts longer in June so she sits out in the courtyard sometimes to sketch flowers in the garden or children running around in circles, laughing. It can frustrating when she just has paper and pencil and the sun starts to sink down into the horizon, because she knows she’ll never see those colors again and her palms sweat at the thought of not capturing it while she has the chance. There’s an aching familiarity to the feeling that she can’t place, but she starts bringing her watercolors out with her, too, some evenings.
The day she told Roy, “It’s not about not loving you, okay? It’s about not loving you enough,” was the same day she enrolled in art classes. She’d had the course catalog tucked away in a drawer at work with all the basics filled out on the application. She chooses classes carefully, only being able to afford three at the very most (and even that was pushing it so she settles for two). She takes beginner’s courses again, because she’s sure she’s forgotten so much, but she finds it all comes back to her so naturally.
Confidence feels good, she decides, and she waits for him to come back to her so she can show him how she’s grown. It never occurs to her that he might not ever come back.
Now she’s standing in front of the microwave, the soft scratching of pencils being her mind’s choice of white noise as she waits for the beep.
***
Three.
Roy doesn’t know how to use anything in their (no, his) apartment. He stares blankly at the dishwasher for a good five minutes before muttering, “fuck it,” under his breath and washing the growing pile of dirty dishes by hand. The silence in the kitchen makes his head hurt, because Pam would always hum when she was doing the dishes or cleaning off the counters or making dinner. Just random notes that didn’t sound like songs, but it was always there. He tries to forget that he would sometimes ask her if she would please be quiet out there, because he’s trying to watch [insert sporting event here].
He’d take it all back, he swears. Everything he ever said to make her feel like- He’d do it. Anything she wanted.
He takes his laundry to his mom’s house, because the washer’s another thing he can’t figure out. He can’t decided when to put the detergent in or what cycle he should be using or what the hell he’s supposed to do with this fabric softener that’s not even the kind they used to always use, because Pam switched it randomly back in April and all his clothes started to smelled like flowers. She used to fold clothes while watching football with him on Sunday afternoons and during the commercial breaks, he’d watch how her hands smoothed over the fabric when she was done folding a shirt.
He can’t get the hang of cleaning the bathtub either, how to get the mildew out of those impossible corners. He spends a Saturday, scrubbing and scrubbing with a sponge until he gives up. Pam would clean the bathroom every other Saturday and now he wishes he had paid attention instead of going off with Darryl or his brother to play basketball at the park. Sometimes he’d get home early and she’d have chick music (Mariah Carey or something) playing loudly on the living room stereo so she could hear it in the bathroom. He’d peek in and see her dancing a little, singing along all off key as she was rinsing out the sink. She’d blush when she noticed him and say, “Sorry,” turning off the music and then, “Let me get you a beer.”
Now he’s stuck in an apartment full of things he’s sure he could understand if she would just come back home and show him how.
unfold is the author of 102 other stories.
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