Another Untitled Piece

Your sorrow is too much to bear.  You look around the apartment, devoid of feeling.  You stare at rich colors of the paintings hanging on otherwise pale walls, finger the knick-knacks on the mantel of the fireplace.  You listen, wait, hoping for the thing that will make this right.  It does not come.  Of course it does not.

Only days before, you were out watering your garden, meticulously kept by you and only you, and envied by mother and all of the ladies she gathers with for brunch and whom she calls friends.  Your garden has been featured in numerous magazines, hailed as a “masterpiece of vegetative splendor.”  Your mother is jealous and no longer comes to see you.  This is how you would have it. 

Your thoughts turn back to him.  You are certain you loved him, at one point, at one critical juncture in your life.  Was it the point at which you realized you were pregnant for the first time?  For surely there could be no purer love than the love a man gives upon the birth of this, his first child.  Was it the time he brought home a bouquet of freshly picked flowers, yellows and pinks and oranges, all right out of Mrs. Pingree’s flower garden?  For surely no man in his right mind would risk being shot at while pilfering from the old lady’s precious beds. 

And there.  You have said it.  No man in his right mind.  Of course he wasn’t.  Couldn’t you see that?  Maybe you couldn’t.  Maybe it was you too blind to see the truth, that this one was incapable of love.  Or so you thought.

You walk to the kitchen, the counters are bare.  In the sink are dishes from the breakfast you ate by yourself and in the bathroom, towels still wet from the shower you took just fifteen minutes ago.  They hang over the shower curtain, pink and blue towels with little angels embroidered onto them, all in gold with silver lining.  And your bed, unmade, untouched, really, for you haven’t slept in two nights.  At least not here.