How it begins

(This is how it begins)

She was playing the piano and watching the notes blur, tear-soaked
music rising. There was no clock, but she heard the one next door
tick-tock into the silence after the last note wept its way out of the
keys. There wasn't a box of tissues either. The other room seemed to
hold all of the necessities. As she stepped through the door a bit of
mascara ran into her eye and it stung like burning. Rushing for the
tissues, she stubbed her toe on a chair in the middle, slightly left,
of the room. More curses ensued.

Blowing her nose in front of the mirror then, she realised how green
her eyes had become lately.

Someone, in the recesses of her mind, was calling her name, but she
didn't listen. Then the phone rang. Not like last time,

"Hello?"

"It's me."

And her world had come crashing down. Again. The smell of stale musk
perfume lingered still in the air but she picked it up anyway,

"Hello?"

"It's me."

Except it wasn't. It kept replaying in her mind so vividly that she
almost thought it was real, this fantasy. She would pick up the phone
and it would be him and all she would have to do was...

"Hello?" but there was only silence. Ever, silence. She lowered the
receiver to her chest, wondering if it was him after all, and could he
hear her heartbeat? Replacing the phone, the cord still wrapped around
her fingertip, her eyes were dry.

(So maybe I dove into the story at the wrong place. There is no
beginning after all. Perhaps this is the end?)

It began in the middle of a snowstorm in the wrong country, a visit.
The snow looked like a ghost's sheet, covering the trees, maybe hanging
out to dry. She was supposed to meet Sarah in an hour, but cars were
useless on the roads now, packed with freeze as they were. She called
Sarah, and then began to walk. It froze her feet, diving into the snow
banks either side of the road, but seeing her friend warmed her,
inexplicably. It had been a long time.

(No, the day before?)

Flora dialed the number, grinning,

"Guess who's here!"

She passed the phone over. His voice was not as she remembered. Of
course, she reprimanded herself, he's grown up.

"He lives round the corner, ask him to come over!" Flora
stage-whispered, magnificently. So she did, of course, and the doorbell
rang just as they were setting the table for lunch. And it was him. And
he was the most beautiful being she had ever seen.

*****

She kept a tape of that intense week for a long time, replaying that
new voice over and over, at ridiculous times of the night, try to get
back to sleep. That soothing now-familiar rasp:

"Um...hi," always the hesitation, "My name is...put the gun away, man!
I don't wanna read these cards!" laughing in the background, others
round the table, she recalls, "Hi this is..." but she always stopped at
the name, frightened it would crack her calm exterior. She felt
nothing. Weeks had passed and there was only a numb sense that she had
lost some part of herself- some innocence, maybe? She used to be so
naive, but he was the one who had said he loved her, right? Got her
into this. She cursed under her breath again. He said so much, so many
promises.

But she didn't want to remember, somehow. There was work she needed to
do, music practice. She sat down at the piano, empty.

(Back to where I began, wrongly, I confess, because it turns out to be
the end after all.)

"Hello?"

"It's me."

It was just a dream, that one day he would call. He never did, and she
replayed the stale conversations on her Dictaphone, and damned the day
she said she loved him.

Something new was happening though, in the back of her mind (the bottom
of her heart) and slowly, gleefully, she began to push him out.
Something new had captured her attention, and not love-at-first-sight.
That didn't matter any more. She liked to think that this was something
better. No matter, but now she knew what to do.

(The phone rang:

"Hello?"

"It's me."

She hung up, smiling in her strength)