Midnight Walk without Snow

I wanted it to get me into trouble, but it wouldn’t, and I knew that. And I suppose you knew that. And so you know, I decided to leave.

I could hear you stirring the sugar into your tea and humming a tune that sounded like a lullaby I should know. I tiptoed to the bathroom, stepping around the easy-to-creak sections of the oak floors. It’s moments like this where I can’t tell if you hear me avoiding you or not. If you do and you let it go, or let it wilt into a grudge. When you’re in the other room washing dishes, I said I would wash, or you're lifting the full trash bags out of the bins, I want to call out and ask, “Are you building resentment right now? Is it too late to stop it?” I used to help more around the house, but it never seemed like you noticed, so I stopped. I was never a saint. I do things to be noticed, and if they’re not, I don’t do them for very long.

I stood by the creaking door and told you I’d be back to get my things sometime tomorrow. You stood arms crossed, leaning in the doorway, acting far more saintly than was necessary. I could’ve scoffed had I wanted you to feel bad, but I didn’t, so I didn’t. “You can stay till morning. I’ll sleep in the living room. So you don’t have to bother your mother at this time.”

I nodded and agreed, but upon looking behind you and seeing the eggshell-colored living room, barely held up by the single glowing table lamp, it all looked far too depressing. “It’s okay. I’ve already called her. I’ll see you tomorrow.” You nodded, and I saw you declaring to yourself that you would never again be kind to me. Not in any real way, at least. I looked down, hoping to look wounded enough for you to take it back, but then, cutting my gesture short, you said goodbye, and I left. I had told you I’d wanted a break and was hoping this would anger you into a passionate defense of why we were actually meant to stay together, so that I could feel just a little flicker of hope in my gut and be reminded that all was alright. But this didn’t happen. I wasn’t yelled at like I was expecting to be yelled at. You just nodded, which angered me to the point of calling you selfish, and the rest was a string of sighs, internal frustrations, and nods, along with arms crossed. All the ways we had learned to express complete and absolute resignation.

Walking onto Euclid Ave, the cold air leaked onto all bare skin, and I blushed. It smelled like ice cubes. To my mother's house it was. It was October in Syracuse, and everyone was getting ready for the giant blizzards predicted to hit this weekend. But it was Friday, and it still hadn’t snowed. We had all graduated with our bachelor’s degrees a couple of months ago. And I was more worried than others, but also far less worried than more of the others. There was always a worry for your peers who were all talk, as you always were yourself, knowing it’s gonna be a hell of an embarrassing time graduating and standing in front of all the people we’ve ever lied to. Friends and family and ex-lovers and professors and ex-friends.

Graduation itself fattened into a vibrant marigold feast of regrets and quiet flinches of shame remembered in the early morning showers. This life after college required no verbal confession on your part, as it will become quite clear what path you ended up taking. My life so far wasn’t turning out to be all that bad, but it was definitely not a life you can just be thrown into. It required some warming up to. Working at a grocery store as vibrant as it was in color was not vibrant at all in feeling.

The second month after graduating hit cold-river-belly-flop hard. There was a sharp, beaten-down depression in coming to terms with the fact that my dreams could only stand on their own two feet if they were kept vague. The comfort they produced was, in fact, very real; it just so happened that the dream itself wasn’t. Dreams had somewhere along the way become these vast auditoriums we filled with the masses who never gave us much thought, and beyond that, it wasn’t very clear precisely what they were.

My mother’s place was about a twenty-minute walk. The houses stood in line, waiting to get their fill of me walking by. Dark oaks towered. I looked up and tried spelling out curse words in the sky, but the stars were too far apart. I stopped to watch a family of deer for a second, but they had noticed me and were skeptical. Seeing deer at night in suburbia was a little like seeing buses on the highway. It wasn’t anything to bring up to others the next day, but you always noticed it.

I joined the quiet of Suburbia and organized myself as a body probing forward, a mind tapering straight ahead, thoughts honing in. Supermarkets and failed love interests. I had so far only accumulated lackings and endings and dead ends for self-definition. I was fully composed of all that I had at one time or another, tried to be. Nothing yet that was.

I reached my mother’s house on the corner of Euclid and Fellows. She buzzed me in, and the wind slammed the door shut behind me. The next morning, I woke up to white enclosing the window from all sides, building up from the lawns and pouring down from above. I could hear the espresso machine murmuring and eggs frying. I hardly produce any sounds these days. I tiptoe and whisper sorry when pushing through turnstiles or exiting crowded buses. I sat up and watched the cold white infest the lawns. The world outside the window was bleaching itself colorless.