A Cold Farewell

“You’re getting on my nerves.”

Jason stared at me across the table top, its wooden surface tired and weathered from years of supporting conversations like this one, our half empty glasses facing one another like chess pieces at war.  I couldn’t read his look – perhaps I didn’t want to.  The conversation had been going round in circles for the last two hours and I was beginning to feel tired and weathered myself.

“What? That’s all you have to say to me?” His tone was accusatory, bitter, but then what else would it have been? The words had not been there inside my mind but now they were out, I realised the weight of their truth.  I could make a hundred inoffensive excuses for wanting to end the relationship but in reality this is what it came down to.  Jason bothered me, irritated me. The things he did which had seemed so innocuous at first had begun to grate on me with increasing force.  He wasn’t a bad person but he was a person within whom I felt I could no longer invest my emotions or my time.

He was still staring.

“I’m sorry,” I offered, a final vague gesture of goodwill.

“No Carrie, you’re not sorry,” He responded and in one movement, characteristically dramatic, he drained the remainder of his pint and stalked out of the bar.

I breathed a sigh of relief – it was finally over. I was free.

And he was right, I wasn’t sorry at all.


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