When she woke up he was already gone. She turned to face his empty side of the bed and felt like she if she closed her eyes she would have still been able to hear him breathing. The pillow still smelled like him and she wondered how long it would hold his smell before her own took over with her one, monotonous scent.
She got up and went to the bathroom. She sat on the toilet, she flushed. She looked at herself in the mirror and started to pick at the crust in the corners of her eyes. Looking at herself made her feel terrible. Sadness clung to her face like a net. It bore the undeniable evidence of what had happened.
She made herself some coffee and started to unclip the clothes that hung on the washing line outside. The clock in the kitchen pointed at twenty past ten. If he’d only stayed one more night, listened to her for one more hour, he would have understood. She folded the clothes and put them back in the half empty closet. This silence, she found, was unbearable.
She made herself breakfast and ate it on the small wooden table under the window that faced outside. Her eyes looked on absently at the green garden as she ate her toast. She would have apologised, again, for smashing the glass, and this time he would have understood. She would’ve found a way to explain that was perfect and seamless and would have fixed everything. The glass would have been forgotten. Like it had never happened.
The reality was that coming home to see the half full bags, sitting at the foot of the sofa like an accusation, had started to coat the house with the silence that would follow his departure. She had found him sitting on the bed with red-rimmed eyes. For a long time, he said nothing at all.
The clock pointed at eleven. She washed the coffee pot and the plate. Never mind his endless hours lying on the couch, not talking to her, never wanting to go anywhere, or the ways he would speak to her when he was tired and couldn’t contain the edge that soured him on the inside. She had believed he was the one person she was meant to forgive over and over again.
In the bedroom, the broken glass was still on the floor. The shards reflected some of the late morning light streaming in through the window. She walked over to where they were, scattered in a pile close to the wall and hovered over them. The glass had broken, he had left. She wished she could take it all back.