There is a silence amongst them that pleads like the moon against her patent-leather flats. They huddle close, his eyes filled with a warning similar to that of his words moments before. She’s convinced that if it wasn’t for the snow, he would be walking away.
But she was naïve that night and didn’t bring a coat. She was naïve in the way that she put on too much makeup with the hope that it would make a difference in his lucid eyes. Mostly, she was naïve to the last few weeks and how he “didn’t really want her” anymore.
Snowflakes litter her tousled blonde hair as she shivers within his unwelcoming arms. She whispers too many “I’m sorry’s” into his shoulder and he tilts his head to the night sky, heaving a long, desperate sighhhh.
Thirteen and a half minutes pass as flames from the adjacent bar lick across his face. Tears teem her mascara-coated blues and he shakes his head slowly, discounting ‘their last few hours of time together’ to ‘their last few hours of nothing.’
She manages to part her lips and “I never wanted this,” slips across her tongue.
“Neither did I,” he replies, his arms loosening around her, a wind flashes between them as a barrier. Snow does not hesitate and neither does his imminent anger or her unintentional hopelessness.
“Then why… why this?” she mutters between sobs, sodden tears plastered to her rosy cheeks. She hears him inhale sharply as if he regrets this as much as she does.
“Pam, please,” he retorts as he steps back, surrendering her to the icy chill. Her naked shoulders hunch forward, her ‘little black dress’ a sudden regret as she shivers under the moonlit alleypath.
There isn’t much to say after that so he walks away, turning from the girl who gave him everything, the girl who wanted to be in his life more than he even wanted it and the girl who gave herself for someone who never thought of her as anything more than just that: another girl.
Suddenly she’s home. She collapses against the wall, her fingers gliding across its violet paint as cries out in denial, a rushed, urgent crest of desperation. She crumples into a heap of lifeless limbs, her hair sprawled across the wooden floor and her fingers pushed against her face.
Between gasps she tries to convince herself that she focused her life on him because there was nothing else. But she knows, deep down in the ache of a midnight cry, that he was the only thing worth making a dream about.
After her eyes drain, she curls up against plush pillows with a cool bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream and watches reruns of Sex and the City play on her too-small television screen. As she pretends to be relaxed she can’t help but think of when his hand unintentionally brushed against hers as they shared a laugh, or when they knocked knees under the dinner table and how he would reach for her hand as they sipped wine, or even when they waved goodbye under the rising moon and above the gravel of a parking lot.
As she watches Carrie and her friends frolic throughout the bustling streets of New York City as their cliché lives unfold on the glass screen before her, she finally understands what it is like to have been broken-up with. It’s never been that way for her. When she stumbled through her teenage years, she always felt guilty when she muffled cries against her pillow in the early morning because she never felt like she deserved to feel her throat tightening or her hands trembling underneath straggled sheets. She did not have many boyfriends – two and a half (oh, the truisms of kindergarten love) to be precise – and she hated how she never realized how lucky she was to not feel the true twinge of an angry, love-stricken, two-week plunge into the depths of a merciless break-up aftermath.
But she wasn’t so lucky tonight.
She flicks off Sex and the City, sick of the perfection that her life will never be, and lays in the darkness of her bedroom as she engulfs the loneliness that creeps against her skin. Moonlight trickles through the window pane and caresses her pansy-painted toes and she shivers as the digital clock flickers twelve sixteen.
She crawls into bed and flicks off her light and feels her throat constrict as she muffles “it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay” into the midnight bedroom air. The moon smiles outside her window, its dark affect creeping along her skin and through her nervous glances. Her fingertips glide to a clump of sheets and she tugs them closer and drags her legs against her chest.
The moon knocks on her window and screams for her to smile too, but she knows smiling will only make the walls of her loneliness stronger.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Okay, so I pray to The Office writers that Jim would never do this to her, but I wanted to explore the topic anyway.
Chapter End Notes:
Good? Hopefully! :)
