The Suicide Hotel (Addendum)

  Sleep, begrudgingly, is giving way to consciousness. There is a struggle in my aching head. I want to keep my eyes closed, let the world work, tick, function as I capitulate and stagnate in these sheets. But the need to meet certain biological demands (empty my bladder) is becoming harder to ignore. My eyes open and the view of the room drifts in. 

  I am alone. She is gone. 

  Sitting myself upright I let my mind calm down. It could be momentary and she could be back. Just breathe a little, breathe. A slight pain as I hoist myself up, walk to the en suite and do what I have to do. There's no toothbrush there. No toiletries at all, actually. 

___

  I didn't hear a thing, feel a thing, as she pulled her body away from me - vacated the sheets we shared. The room is so empty, eerily quiet. And I didn't hear the sound of her squeezing into those jeans. The slight squeak of the door as she closed it behind her, a door which divides my existence, her existence... but how? 

___

(Addendum)

  It's the haunting melody of her hum that I overheard as she changed out of her clothes... It's the way her eyes were fixated on the sky, kind of like she wanted to climb up there into that sea of black and white, find some peace there; it's the way her body felt in my arms, as though the flesh of her belonged to me but the beat of her heart, that rhythm was in some other domain, a dance from some other dimension and she was synchronised with something else. Something I couldn't understand. 

  You think you read a situation, that you're seeing that dim despair leaving someone's eyes. And maybe it did and maybe the sadness in her receded a little. Maybe that smile was real. Maybe the kisses really meant, I don't want you to let go. 

  But maybe that sudden burst of emotion we experienced could have been some sort of catalyst. The rapid rise of romance only served to illustrate to her just how rapid things come and, by extension, how rapid things go. Life is a little series of victories and tragedies, a cycle of gaining and losing she believes and what happens when you're just that kind of person and the cycle is too fast and your life is too unstable?

  What happens at The Suicide Hotel? 

___

  Schrodinger's Girl. it's the name of the novel I wrote about her, some years after that experience. Schrodinger's Girl - because I never really knew what happened to her and she will always exist in two states to me. She left, her possessions gone. All that she left in that room was a note placed in an envelope and it's a note I doubt I'll ever read; I don't want to know what it contains.