Inchoate

And what if she did lie, but not for the reason you thought she did.

When she said she didn't know how to handle your crippling anxiety, your bleak inability to see yourself and where you were going, or your stubborn refusal to be anything anyone wanted from you, what she was really saying was she had another way of dealing with it, another way of surviving her own life. You forgot she had a life long before she met you, a life less clean, less sheltered, less privileged.

She went back to the needle, and the grift, and the blur of hours into weeks spent chasing that soft-wrapped warmth of opiates. The filthy weeks she couldn't talk to you about because of your own self-importance, the weeks spent either shitting her soul out, unable to leave the bathroom or straining, striving to pass anything as the chemicals slowed her system far down. A clean needle wasn't as important as what it contained, that quick trip down into the Disconnect, where memories and traumas can't seep through the walls and find you begging to be someone else.

That night weeks after she'd left, when she called you, asking where it went wrong and if you could both find the way back, she was laying beside a stranger with a fat wallet and a pocket full of foils, a cheap ticket to somewhere else where the feelings couldn't reach her and the past couldn't keep up. She whispered for help but all you felt was the loss, the mourning, the fear that you'd lost that one connection to the real world, and even though you wanted her back, wanted her like never before, she'd already gone and left a scent, a memory, a ghost of who she was.

The glasses don't hide her worn eyes, but you can see your own lines, your own fatigue, reflected back in them. The drawn skin on her face fragile and textured like crepe, like you could tear the misery from her face and reveal who she was twenty years ago. Her smile is still the same, slightly gappy, slightly forward, but it doesn't quite connect with her soul, the connection corroded and worn out so long ago. She toys with something in a wide glass, glittery crystals lining the rim except where the plum blush of her lipstick has smudged on the glass, and the faint gap in the tan on her left ring finger makes you curious.

'So here we are, again.' she murmurs, her accent different, and less distinct.
'Mmhmm. It's been a long time. A long time. What made you track me down?'
'I made a promise a long time ago.'

You pause, and wonder which promise she meant. The promise to stand by you no matter what? The promise to love you until the end, because she was about to tell you her darkest secret, and you were going to tell her about the nightmares and the PTSD and the slipping grip you had on the fragments of your life? The promise that you would always be together?
'A promise to--' you glance again at the whiter mark on her finger '--yourself? Or to me?'
'I can't remember, only that it's stuck with me all these years. This isn't what you think though, this isn't about... us.' The word has a barbed, painful accent to it, it's a single syllable but it drips with guilt and fear, with lies and pain. You're not sure who's at this point.

'Are you divorced?'
'We are... separated. I haven't seen Mark in a year. He was on the Euripides.'
Ah yes, Mark. The playboy-engineer-turned-astro-hero, whose social history you may have glanced at when you realized who she'd married. That Mark. Even his vids were charming and successful, like watching ads for successful billionaires.

The waiter walks past and you can tell he's trying to work out if you'll drink another, if you're worth trying to get a tip out of. He brushes past without pausing and moves to the bar.
'So. Why the call? Why the meeting? Why are you here in this city? This is off the beaten track for you isn't it, slumming it down here?'

She used to have a tic, when you would both argue and you'd hit a nerve. A slight tremble in the muscle of the eyelid, the tiniest dilation in her pupil letting you know you'd hit her where it hurt. Part of knowing each other so well, of being the most intimate you'd ever been with another person, was knowing just how to hurt each other just as well as you knew how to please each other.

'Don't be cruel. You know why I'm sitting here, why I need your help.'

You pause, breathing deep and letting out a quiet sigh. It's always a dame in distress, always an easy way to twist your arm and draw you in again. Every girlfriend has been the same, always needing rescuing, sometimes needing rescuing from being rescued. There was always a silent cry for your own rescue while you focused on them and what they needed, to your own detriment and inability to ask for help. Nothing like saving the world's drowning while you're spluttering and sinking yourself, right?
'Tell me.'
She reaches for your hand. You don't pull away, but you don't squeeze back, you're a mannequin, a puppet, a statue. Inside your blood thins and heats, and in the space of a breath you remember how she'd hold your hand, or your thigh, or your neck, or a thousand other places, and how you danced a dance you'd never found since.
'Jenny. I need your help. I need you.' She looks in your eyes in a way you haven't been looked at in a long, long time. Not since she left you broken and empty and unable to do a thing but rage and get as close to tears as you'd been since your parents died when you were ten.
The waiter sees his opening and glides over from the bar.
'Can I get you ladies--'
'Double gin, rocks. Thank you' You murmur. You can taste the kerosene flavors already, swirling in your mouth like synthetic bile. Here we go again, past the sentinels on the rocks. Onwards you fool, ever onwards...