...In a trillisecond of weakness...

In a trillisecond of weakness, He forgot to say…aloud what he might have instantly felt at a more protected part of himself, had he been so secure.

Walking beside each other with revolving thoughts like revolving doors opening and turning each idea around and around.

‘I read your words and just felt my breath was pulled away from my lips and my chest felt the urgency of what I understood to be a yearning to tell you … I warmed to each word…’

Two steps down the yard where two steps down were taken one foot at a time, and each time, somehow he managed to avoid any deeper meanings being revealed.

If he had said this it could have changed everything between them.

Her beautiful wolf-like spirit that would remain untamed by him, he in turn becoming involuntarily exiled.

Her perfume subtle, familiar and a mixture of different toiletries reminded him of spring flowers dampened by early summer rain.

She had no need to hide behind decorative camouflages, yet her natural defences were leading her to disguises.

He on the other hand, was living less by eye-opening ideals and more by those of the paralysing shallow surface views, which he had limply clung to, that maintained him in spiritual vagrancy.

Irrepressibly self-satisfied.

He was adroit at faking listening; ‘I am listening…’ he would say whilst ensuring he was engaged in some pointless mental exercise.

To avoid admitting that in actual fact he lacked any comprehension of the barest dialogue that did not relate in some way to his sense of self-importance he played ‘dumb’.

Who were those social connections that he was quick to hunger for, those that offered him the keys to doors; that crossed into airy light rooms full of superficial ambience and contrived artistry.

Where were they now?

Turning the corner at the post office, where ivy smothered sycamores lined the pedestrian walkway; she was turning a blind corner, one he would miss.

Avant-garde interests had more than once drawn her away, but a conceited part of his pride always thought she would return to him, merely because he thought he deserved such adulatory loyalty.

Her lipstick was already worn away, and every time she bit her lip, he felt unease.

His investment in ‘them; had been little more than verbal impasse, and no further than his own personal safety in comfortable routine.

If he had been more honest, then the response he would have received may have been more than the bittersweet silence distancing them now.

Who could he turn to now?

Quietness starved as it was; moving her far apart to a place he would eventually come to recognise as a goodbye.

Spiralling tailspin of emotions overwhelmed him, engulfed as he was by clouds of apprehension at the impending earth shattering crash that would come with falling hard.

Her hair seemed to catch the light as she turned for a second and looked at him with dismay.

Pausing at the traffic lights, and waiting to cross, the colours wet by rain sparkled and shimmered, there would be little else bright to recall from this moment.

Then there were no more common touches of comprehension for from that moment the burgeoning fences were up around her.

When would he say ‘Yes’ ?

He was quite remarkable for thinking that expressing his desires and appreciation of her loveliness was itself sufficient to bind her to him unequivocally.

He was tirelessly preventing any chance of being embarrassed by the truth, which was that he was simply stupid, arrogant, and hopelessly lost.

In this visual mushrooming of defences, she contended herself to face up to the challenge of knowing from hereon there would be no further pretences of civility between them.

Was she saying ‘No?’

Walking ahead and allowing the distance between them to increase, almost in an attempt to lose him through the alleys and cobbled road.

The down slopes of dialogue that she invited only forced him into a downslide of emotional terror, one which made him feel as if he were trying to paddle through quicksand and mud.

She had no intention of explaining to him where he was, and how.

‘Wait up!’ Catching his breath he felt a sluggishness that pushed his chest into his back as he tried to catch his breath and still keep up with her speedy retreat.

Autumnal rain was colder sometimes than winter sleet.

No more waiting.

He shuddered knowing he was avoiding screaming something wakefully scary into the dark night that might have drawn attention to him that wasn’t that of ego stroking.

Perhaps he had realised this at some subconscious remodelling level of himself, who really knew?

He tried to recall when she last smiled, really locking eyes with him.

Being incapable of meeting the situation head on he would be screeching to a soft landing halt, as he back peddled to get away.

Prolonging the moment that would part them forever.

He was rigidly insensitive but managed to blind himself to such truths, even as he was blinded for a moment by a car’s headlights shining mockingly through wet rain.

Yearning no more.

Right now, in that moment when he had lost his opportunity to rise beyond the pretences of acting in character, he was the victim of closure.

Even now like a fleshy soft bellied maggot caught on the hook of her words, he wriggled uncomfortably but to weak to find the power in words that could have rescued him for power was an alien quality within him.

Folding her arms around her as she fought off the bitter wind, and his inarticulate groan of self-pity.

He stepped sideways to allow a luscious Ethiopian woman elegantly crafted by God, to hurriedly walk past him, pulling her small child’s hand close into her waist as she did so.

The role that he clung to would eventually choke him.

He recalled for a moment the high-spirited mischief that he had engaged in to surprise and impress his dates.

It had developed from those shallow acquaintances and friendships he had nurtured that had eventually he also succumbed to….

In truth beyond being an ornamental crutch to this weak man, there was little more he could offer her than the obvious flattery common to those as ingratiating as he.

Would any such tactics work now?

He had no idea that the future would bring with it awkward silences, and no repeat opportunities to reclaim this precious jewel of a moment.

Wondrous beings that held hands and dissolved into laughter as they shared their private intimacies would be an existence beyond his reach very soon.

Deterioration that would eventually dissolve him into a space that no-one else would wish to occupy with him for his values would dissipate along with his self importance.

“When can I call you?”

A moment that he may have clutched to harder had it occurred to him that he was throwing away another significant opportunity to grow.

In some past ordeal he had thought he had come through such intense emotion with courage.

Not realising it was hardly more than a cat’s whisker lost on the breeze.

Had she answered, she would have flown into his face with claws of repressed frustration for nothing was more repulsive than a weak character to her.

The lure was fatal.

Looking as she always was for rapid-fire brilliance, and finding it to be a rare thing, so instead settling as she always did for silent audiences.

Was it always so easy to step aside and avoid stepping into the same autumn rain puddle that she may have jumped feet first into?

He glanced over to her for a tepid moment; many such instances would become part of his hasty retreat from reality.

Tripping over a lie.

Irrevocably uncommitted as he was, she herself took a small step away from such a funereal walk of lifetime mediocrity.

Away from him she was already freeing herself from remembering his foolishness and believing in herself beyond the lack of such belief in her by him.

“Couldn’t you have ever been more than this?”

It occurred to him that she was never going to comfort, him and he in turn, reward her with his views, since she was no longer attentive to his needs.

Slipping away.

To admit he had been a fake would have undermined his own sense of personal stature in a paddock of mulish fatigue.

“I am listening”, he said (yet ensuring he positioned himself with his coffee cup so that he could see others that may have been more interested in him or interested him.

As if to complement meant to lose something within himself and to be therefore diminished in some way.

She recognised in him what he had always known but managed to avoid facing, that he was incapable of offering limitless possibilities of romance and love.

Rooted in suburbia.

Seated for the last time together in an uncommonly quiet teashop where the draught chilled his neck, and he envied for a moment her warm apparel of scarves, hat and gloves.

Even when the sugar bowl that had salt mixed into it by some juvenile prankster, spilt over his half broken donut.

It could always be explained away by those restrained remarks that he had learnt from others who also lacked charm and perspicuity to recognise what was real and what was not.

Clinging to disbelief.

He carefully counted out his change, trying to appear generous, but acutely aware that he wanted to hold on to every single coin as if his life depended upon it.

Releasing from his clamminess.

Something she was astutely aware of, that made her bite her lip and pull the air and space around her even more territorially.

One such memory briefly woke his senses but was ungratefully rejected by his desire to be in control.

Such helplessness may have been endearing to her once, but now it was no longer stimulus for attentiveness on her part, let alone analysis.

Offering so little, taking so much.

He was no storybook fantasy, in fact he lacked any real cognitive awareness of how far removed he was from any kind of ideal.

Yet he had idealised her beyond her need to fulfil any such prevarication.

She almost appeared to skip away from him whilst he rationalised his thinking to quickly disappear inside himself again.

Thinking it would be easier to come back once the dust had settled from her he was already tricked by his pride and ego into a self absorbed vanity.

Such limited reasoning that precluded the thought that actually he was already a signpost she had chosen in a trillisecond to ignore on a journey elsewhere.

Inexplicably she was gone.




‘In a trillisecond…’ Written by xsapph, 18th October 2001



... Where were you, when you realised you had been exiled from a loved one?...