Yonville

She got out of bed because it was the morning and that’s what you were supposed to do. She stared out the window while the kettle began to boil and thought that nothing good would happen today, or for that matter tomorrow. She put too much salt on her egg.

The sun was shining but that didn’t make her feel happy the way it used to. The walk by the seaside that used to clear her head just made her tired. She was always tired now; the fatigue of a girl who has nothing to interest her. A girl who is finding fewer things to care about as the days get shorter and people leave. The exhaustion was mounting but going to bed made her feel worse. It wasn’t that she couldn’t sleep. She could always sleep. The problem was that, at the end of a wasted day, she wanted to be wasted. She wanted to pour wine down her throat and dance as if she cared about something. Going to bed alone made her feel empty. Going to bed with someone made her feel distant from herself, detached, but at least it was something to do. A story to tell. Sleep had lost its charm anyway. She couldn’t dream anymore, there was nothing there; falling asleep was like she just disappeared for four hours. She was just gone.

She walked to her friend’s house, talked absent-mindedly for an hour and walked home. It was a small town. While she walked she thought about leaving. She thought about how easy it would be to pack a bag and get on a plane. She had been thinking this a lot recently. It never made her feel better because she never went anywhere. She thought about it, and planned it, and almost let herself believe she would do it, and then she remembered all the stupid little wormy reasons why she couldn’t leave. Why she was stuck. And then she gave up a little bit more.

She quit the job she hated. She told her boss it was because her head hurt. Her boss looked at her with curiosity and said “Hmph.” She went home and curled herself into the armchair and read Flaubert and knew Emma Bovary. The restlessness and the continual frustration of a small town and small people and how nothing in real life is ever as colourful as it is in a book. She sat and thought about how that great tragedy of her life was that she had been in love with her best friend for five years and how she would never, ever admit it. She thought that this was a terribly disappointing great tragedy, an anticlimax of a thing, and was mildly upset that her great tragedy wasn’t more interesting, or, indeed, tragic.

That night she sat at home and drank, and watched the red minutes flicker past on her alarm clock, and wished that she hadn’t cried so much in her sleep last night because now she appeared to have run out of tears. And she still felt like crying was the best she could do. The most she could give. The nights when she couldn’t cry, she was just a black hole. A space where there should be a girl, a life. Crying was her new hobby, if you could call it that.

She watched the beginning of a movie, but not the second half. She stayed up too late thinking about the friends who had left her. She thought about what they would be doing in that other life, that other world, on the other side of the sea, back in time. Then she lay down and disappeared into another dreamless sleep. Another night went by without her.