A broken love story

It happened one winter morning, when the city put on her cold as though it were a decoration. Claire had Rilke out in a quiet caf and was reading it and underlining it with a red pen along with drinking black coffee. Eli came in seeking warmth and his scarf fell off the face, and his fingertips trempled off the cold. He did not first notice her eyes but the book.

He crooked a smile. That was a lot of reading on a Tuesday, he said.

Claire did not raise her head at once. Rilke is indifferent as to the day of week.

He laughed, and in the sound there was something that made her close the book.

That is the way it started,--like other things, without fireworks, but a look, a word, a pleasant feeling growing up between strangers. They began to assemble on every Tuesday. Then Thursdays. Those were then their limits.

Eli was a painter that never painted, who claimed that he needed the chaos to feel approximately something, which could be put onto canvas. Claire was a writer and used to fill up journals that she would not allow anyone to read. They were more like pieces of puzzle that should not have fit in the same puzzle-box but had to fit somehow, somewhere.

Their flat was littered with books and brushes, poems that had been started but not completed that were pinned to the wall, sketches on napkins, coffee cups forgotten and molds already growing like a hushed whisper, reminding that all things do not live on neglect.

They had fights on trivial matters. Whose milk is it sitting out. Whoone forgot to purchase toilet paper?. Yet the actual battles, those that left an eerie quiet in the room were never about realities.

One night Eli said to him, speaking of his wearing the mask, you are afraid. You say how you are going to write a novel, and you never show a soul your stuff.

And he is bettern on you? Claire snapped. You can talk of being an artist, when was the last time you held a brush?"

A moist stare passed between them; both naked, both bleeding unseen.

Love did not die out overnight. It frayed. First in little silences, then in missed dinners, then in the manner of how their hands received no longer to one another in the darkness.

Claire posted a short story in a web journal. She failed to confess to Eli.

Eli had a display down town. She was not invited by him.

By spring the bed was a negotiation. She curled up to the window. He confronted the wall.

One morning, on the kitchen table Claire discovered a note. Eli still wrote in a rush, and to her own aching chest it was still written shabbily.

I must go and find something which I lost. Or … well … to remember who I used to be before us. Love me, don t hate me. I adored you I swear.”

Nor dramatic farewell. There is no yelling in the rain. Nothing but an echo of the steps he had taken, and a cup of coffee getting cold upon the table.

Claire shed tears in the shower, when nobody would hear her. After that she began to write, earnestly write again. Not publisher. In order to show something. To just recollect. To feel.

Eli wrote against Berlin in a postcard. Then another at Lisbon. The third never did, due.

The years went by like a she counted. Claire had found another and he was a quiet man, who loved her tenderly, not as Eli had, not with fire but with lamp-light. and that was what she needed, perhaps.

However, she would still get flashes of cold cafes, red pens and crooked smiles during rainy days. Then she would often think about whether Eli managed to get what he was seeking. or whether he ever looked back.

She did not reply to his post cards. By no means because she disliked him. but because not every story requires a follow up.

They only require closures.