Reel

Her own eyes watched her pack.  Her brown eyes in the head of a nine-month-old human being that ate, pooped, and cried.  For real.  It wasn’t a mechanized doll made of plastic and metal and powered by batteries.  It was skin and bones.  Her skin and bones.

 

And her eyes.  Big eyes, so brown they were almost black.  They looked so innocent in the face of a little boy, her little boy.  With blonde curls and a smile that showed four front teeth.  He was her little boy.

 

She paused in the middle of picking a shirt up off the floor when he gurgled, stamped his covered feet as his tiny hands gripped the railing of his crib.  He was staring at her with those big eyes, her eyes, as though he understood what was happening.  She was sure he could read her mind, that the eyes she had given her child could see right through her.

 

Her baby could see all the flaws, the mistakes, the frustration she felt when she realized she wasn’t perfect, wasn’t untouchable, that bad s**t could happen to her too, it wasn’t just reserved for people she didn’t know, didn’t care about.  Life threw curve balls at everyone.

 

The bouncing, drooling, baby boy in front of her was her curve ball, her burden, her curse.  He wasn’t a gift.  Well, maybe he was, but he was one of those gifts she didn’t want.  Everybody got those too.

 

“You’re really going?”

 

For a moment she was sure the baby had spoken, that those words had magically sprung from a body that was just learning to pull itself onto its own two feet.  Then she remembered he was there, sitting behind her on the edge of their bed with his hands clasped between his knees, stubble on his face, and blonde hair hanging in his eyes.

 

The baby would have his hair when he grew up.  All that gorgeous blonde hair that had been the first thing to seduce her.

 

“Yeah,” she said, surprised to hear her voice ring clear.  He wasn’t trying to stop her, trying to pull the duffel bag out of her hands, begging her to stay, screaming that she couldn’t leave him.  Couldn’t leave them. Instead he simply sat on the edge of the bed they had shared in tattered jeans, a t-shirt, and bare feet.  She could see the spattering of light hair on the tops of his bony feet, the lines of bone in his toes.

 

She shoved the shirt she was holding into the already full duffel.

 

“You know,” he began quietly and she stopped to look at him.  He was staring at the duffel.  “If you rolled your clothes up you’d fit more in there.”  He blinked up at her, deep green eyes clear and blank.  There was no anger, no frustration, just a hint of regret, a pinch of despair.

 

“They’d take up less space if they were rolled, so you’d get more in there.”  He explained calmly, as though an explanation was needed.  She stopped to stare at him, unable to keep herself from feeling frustrated and upset.  He wasn’t supposed to be explaining how she should pack her clothes, he was supposed to be stopping her from packing.

 

“Aren’t you even going to try and stop me?” she asked, sounding more like an irritated teenager than she would have liked.  This wasn’t her mother, this was her boyfriend.  She was the mother now.

 

Those green eyes stared into her plain brown ones.  “It wouldn’t make a difference, you’d still leave,” he said matter-of-factly.

 

Just because that was true didn’t make her feel any less frustrated.  It didn’t matter that it wouldn’t stop her from leaving.  He was supposed to try and stop her.  He just was.

 

As she turned her gaze away from his, stooped to pick up a pair of underwear—dirty or clean she did not know—the little boy in the crib burped and reality seemed to come crashing down around her like a fragile pain of glass, shattering into a thousand unfixable pieces.

 

It’s funny how the simplest things can bring your world crashing down around your ankles.

 

The panties hung limply between her fingers as she froze in mid stoop.

 

This wasn’t a movie, her boyfriend wasn’t an actor she didn’t know, the baby didn’t belong to a stranger.  No one was going to try and stop her from leaving because there was no script, no director who told everyone what to do and where to go.  There would be no tearful farewell where she tried to make excuses as to why she was leaving, he wouldn’t forgive her faults and kiss her to make it better.  There would be no happily ever after.

 

This was real life, it didn’t have to make sense.  It didn’t have a script.  It was a chose your own adventure novel only you couldn’t start over if you picked the wrong route, you had to live with your choices.  Or just close the book.

 

She was closing the book.

 

But was it possible to close the book of your memories, to run away from your demons?  Could you escape the darkest corners of your mind forever?  Would she ever be able to forget the baby boy who had her brown eyes and the blonde hair of the man who had once held her heart in his hands?

 

Would her baby remember his mother or was he bound to spend the rest of his life wondering about the woman who had given him his eyes?

 

Was she going to spend the rest of her life asking herself what if?

 

There was no green grass on the other side, the grass over there was just as burnt as the stuff she was currently treading on.  It would crunch under her feet, trampled, defeated, and dead, just like she felt.

 

There was no easy way out, only a myriad of difficult paths she could chose from.  There was nothing easy about real life.  There were no easy choices.  Each choice left behind the things you did not chose, the paths you did not walk, something you might never have the chance to chose again.  A path that would become forever blocked.

 

“Where will you go?” he asked her, his voice so smooth and calm it made her knuckles go white on the duffel bag.

 

She opened her mouth to speak but found no answer.

 

So she pursed her lips and continued packing. He didn’t ask her again, but this time she wasn’t surprised that he didn’t force an answer out of her.  Reality weighed heavy on her shoulders now.  She had aged years in the last few minutes.

 

There wasn’t an answer to every question.  There was an answer to this one but she didn’t want to give it.  I don’t know.  That would be admitting defeat.  Maybe she had realized her life was not neatly stored in a basket with a bow tied around it, but she would not admit that this was a faulty decision, an illogical one.  There was nowhere to go.  So she would have to make somewhere to go.

 

She gave him no answer and he didn’t ask for one.  Somehow he knew what her answer would be, but unlike the movie you see on a Friday night, her knight in shining armor would not tell her he knew, would not rub it in her face and make her stay.  He would let her go, he would say goodbye, a word so rarely used in movies but so often used in real life.

 

She didn’t kiss him goodbye, she didn’t glance at her gurgling baby boy as she zipped up her duffel bag and left the room, left the apartment.  She left her life behind in the form of a baby boy with the soft brown eyes and a crooked smile.

 

Her life could have been a movie, but it was a movie no one would want to see.

Reviews

[Afyn]

Very nicely written with a lot of dialogue that added to the stpry perfectly and it left me with more questions than answers, which I feel it was designed to do. The ambigous feel of it seemed well implimented aswell and it all tied nicely together allowing me to feel emotion for three unamed and faceless characters. This is what short writing should be, and this piece deserves more recognition.