She moves to London

The morning that she told him she was leaving was preceded by a night of torrential rain, a downpour that seemed to flood every orifice of the city. It turned all the refuse into flotsam, a heaving body of waste—so that by the morning and with the receding of the waters, all that remained was the debris conjured up by the flood—empty cans, egg cartons, lidless beer bottles—all of it deposited on the doorsteps of the city, next to the morning’s post. She was planning to move to London. ‘I’m moving to London,’ she told him as he traipsed from bed to shower to kitchen. Mechanically, he continued the actions that he performed every morning, retrieving milk from the fridge and filling a bowl with cereal—all the while plainly, politely responding, ‘That sounds cool,’ the spoon clinking against the bowl, ‘how long do you think you’ll go there for?’ The conversation invariably left him upset, or at least it should have, he thought, but during it, he felt quite calm. For some inexplicable reason, he couldn’t quite conjure the appropriate, righteous indignation.

They’d been dating for half a year. ‘I think you’re my boyfriend now.’ She told him after a few months. He agreed. It was summer then, and it hardly rained. She liked being submerged in water; she told him, ‘I love to float in water; maybe it's like a prenatal thing.’ They frequented the pool that summer. He liked to sit on the edge of the pool and watch her as she swam laps or floated. He hadn’t realised it at the time, but he would later remember that moment in a sprawling catalogue of images. Images of her—bathing suit clinging to her gooseflesh, tan under the light of the day, young and lithe and powerful—flickered through his mind at night. He drove her to the beach near where he grew up. ‘And this was the beach near where I grew up,’ he said, pointing to the skinny coast. They swam in the waves—the great green waves that buffeted them in the breeze, cool and calm on a bright summer day—and he held her in the waves as she floated gently in the sea, her long brown hair almost black with water, trailing behind her like seaweed. She told him, ‘I think that I’m falling in love with you.’ He couldn’t quite hear her over the sound of the waves. ‘I love you too. I really do.’ He whispered in her ear, wet and salty with the sea.

Reoccurring dreams. Often he was swimming, either in the pool or in the ocean, a great expanse of water, desperately paddling against the current. The pool and the ocean and the rivers and the lakes—all of them seemed to flow into each other in the dream. And just over the horizon, he could always make her out—she was floating face up, like she always did, bobbing serenely. If he could only swim a little further, into the next body of water—but he could never seem to reach her. He was taunted by these images of her—silent pictures, unmoving. In the dreams she is lying next to him, his head pressed into her hair; she is standing above him with a cup of coffee as he wakes up; she is sleeping in the passenger seat while he drives the car. Most nights he would wake up in sweat from these dreams, the rain falling noisily outside. Often he would come to with an erection—ridiculous and unwanted and pressing into the sheets like some perverse antenna, radiating out into the emptiness of the double bed. He would try to picture her again, touching himself resentfully. He would try to remember those images from the dream—her, supine, naked on the bedclothes, illuminated in the warm light of the summer evening—but the images would slip away, receding into his subconscious as quickly as he could conjure them. It was becoming more difficult to remember her face in detail, even her voice; often only her body remained, but it was unconvincingly lifeless. It often felt to him like a bad joke—the foolish inevitability of these erections. His involuntary member created a pornographia—a mockery of the pure memories that came to him like shining ghosts in the night. He returned to sleep, unsatisfied.

She never really explained why she was moving to London. He asked her, of course, in the days following her revelation, when he was better able to muster some disgruntlement. He supposed that the shock was what initially dulled his reaction. ‘Didn’t you think I’d find it a little strange, you just leaving like this?’ ‘It’s not like we’ve been together for very long.’ She said distractedly. ‘I’m not really sure what to make of it, that’s all.’ He wanted to ask simple questions like, ‘Does this mean you don’t want to be with me?’ They felt too coarse, too obvious—her coolness in the situation seemed to effectively defuse any offence that either of them might be able to take. He felt foolish, like he’d completely misread things, like he had come on too strong, so to speak. Later, when she said goodbye to him, he wondered if she was going to miss him at all. ‘Goodbye.’ She said, and she kissed him on the cheek. He could smell her perfume as she leant in. ‘Goodbye.’ He said, and they descended the stairs of her apartment. She climbed into an Uber, carefully placing her suitcase in the back, before driving off. As the car pulled out from the kerb and rounded the corner, he could see only the slim picture of her face in the backseat, illuminated dully by the light of her phone. It had begun to rain again, or perhaps it hadn’t stopped, and he walked aimlessly for a while before taking the train home.

‘I’m almost used to the food now,’ she told him, ‘though I can’t say that I like beans, in fact; I don’t think I ever did.’ She continued, ‘Not much else is happening here. It's really rainy.’ He struggled to think of a response. ‘I’m hoping that this job will work out. It’s so expensive here.’ They were succeeding in small talk, at least: the weather, food, and work. This seemed to be all they were capable of discussing over the phone. All of their conversations were now over the phone—it had been two months since she’d moved to London, and it wasn’t clear if or when she was going to return. They hung up without much hassle, and their goodbyes were brief. They were maintaining a businesslike decorum, he thought. He had wanted to tell her the truth—that he missed her, that she still turned him on—the memory of her, at least, vivid and shining, lapping at the edge of his mind. He had wanted to tell her how much he still loved her, he thought, and that he wanted her to return. That he missed those coastal evenings—as they wet themselves against the dry of the summer—driving home to their bedroom—tangled in the sweat of their clothes—then falling, naked and childlike, into the warmth of sleep. Instead, they just rang off, briefly and painlessly. It was a grey morning, still raining outside. He noted this as he descended the stairs, shivering a little from the cold. He opened the front door. An empty can of tomatoes, an egg carton, soaking wet and torn, a bottle of Heineken, sticker peeling and cap missing and some letters all littered the doorstep. The ink had run from the envelopes, and he could no longer read their contents.