LOST IN THE SHRAPNEL

He came and went as he pleased. I didn’t care enough to ask where he was going during his long absences, or why. I didn’t even wonder about it. He just drifted in and out of my life like it belonged to him. I was just another piece of furniture to move from one corner of the room to another. 

       He was something I couldn’t control, like the weather. The sharp lightning bolts of his anger came hard and fast when I least expected it. I was long beyond the hot rush of blood that I had felt a long time ago, and I only endured and continued on with the grim certainty that there was nothing else waiting for me on the horizon.

       It seemed like we had lived that way forever, and that there was nothing that would ever stop the endless grind of every passing day. While he was there, I held my breath. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t breathe. 

       When he left, I waited until I was gone before slipping out into the clean air and getting drunk on the wild freedom of the streets so filled with cars and lights and sounds. The sidewalks thronged with people who were somehow undeniably out of my reach. Even if I had dared to try, I couldn’t have broken the barrier between me and everyone else.

       But inside my apartment, all that life had been snuffed out long ago. The only things that changed were the patterns of sunlight as days grew longer and shorter and the feel of the floor on my feet in the morning as summer turned to winter. Nothing else ever would, even as the world shifted around us to something unrecognizable. 

       I couldn’t dream about any other kind of life, but all those pieces of myself that I discarded over the years stayed in the walls, and I felt them call out to me. Even if I did nothing for myself, they would do it for me.

       I no longer remembered how to ask questions, so I never understood what they meant until the small cracks started forming. They crisscrossed the concrete walls like spiderwebs, leaving fine dust all over the floor.

       It didn’t matter how often I swept, the crumbs of a life I could have lived were always there. He noticed them, too, and talked to the building manager, but none of the carpenters that came seemed to be able to do anything to fix it.  

       My lost heartbeats burrowed farther into the wall like termites, and the floor groaned as the cracks became bigger and the structure couldn’t support its weight. My upstairs neighbor came to complain about the damage to his own home one afternoon just after he had left and I was alone with the devastation. 

       I listened as he told me his floor was caving in on one corner of the dining room and that he had to change the electrical installations and pipes as the walls became deformed. I said that many people had already come to try and fix it, but no one could. I wondered if he could see the same emptiness I did lurking at the bottom of my eyes.

       I didn’t mind living in a battlefield. I was used to it. But that day, I knew that I couldn’t inflict any damage on anyone unfortunate enough to be in the range of ground zero. I didn’t have many things, perhaps because I had been preparing to flee for so long that I forgot. 

       I was sure he would be gone a few days, so I had time to get a head start before he came back. As I walked out of the door, I could feel all the small slivers of myself that had been hiding for so long in the dark come out and rejoin what little was left of blood in my veins. Nothing could take the building back to how it had been, but now, no more storms would slowly chip away at the foundations.