Every so often I see someone who has one of the Sicilian’s features, like the beard or the crazy hair or the eyes, and it kicks my teeth in with a sound like air being sucked out of a plane.
I am so very happy to be through it. All I can remember is the wicked winter cold and the feeling of being in his life on sufferance. I have a slew of saved emails from Allen saying “Doll, I hate to see you waiting around all the time…I hate to see you stuck up in your house like a tower…”
The last month, when I was living in his room, there was a day I spent lying in bed. I couldn’t move; no energy. He hung around reading and playing on his laptop and watching movies and all the stuff he usually did, and I just laid there watching him or the ceiling, not thinking about anything. At 4:00 he went to work and I hugged him from the bed and stayed there. Finally, about four hours later, I got up and went outside. I walked around campus for a while with no sense of where I was going, and finally ran out of steam and just stood at a fork in the path for a good ten minutes with a head completely devoid of thought. Sat down for another fifteen minutes, I think. People would come by and stare and I didn’t really register much. Finally I climbed a tree just to be doing something. Stayed up there for a long time, in the cold with no shoes on. When my nose was too clogged to breathe, I went home.
I moved out a few days later, we broke up, things got better. I don’t know why I’m even thinking about it, except that it’s starting to get cold again and I walk by that tree most days after work and my office is still two blocks from his house.
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