Mouth

or, a short story

It was summer, not too long ago but too many years now that I don't remember the date, a summer that was hot and dry and with a sky so blue that only upon occasion would it be graced by a singular cloud, its edges a faint grey-white that looked like bone. Each morning during that indeterminate summer I would stand on a balcony facing north, bathed in sunlight and aware of the rich scent of flowers growing along a vine that clung to the old red-brick wall of the building in which I stood. The scent was of jasmine, or perhaps something else, honeysuckle or wisteria or even sweet pea, I don't remember exactly, it could have been any of those or none, for scent does not linger within memory like the images of clouds. In any case, it's unlikely I cared back then what the flowers were. Not like now.

But this story isn't about flowers or the misremembered scent of jasmine, it isn't about how it was a hot dry summer and that in the morning I could stand on a balcony facing north, drenched in sunlight in a suburb of a city in which I still live—not the same suburb as now, not at all, but one close by and that upon occasion I will happen to wander, my footsteps taking me past a road with a café that once upon a time was something else—watching as individual bone-white clouds brushed their way across the sky.

It's not about that.

It's about you.

Because you'll never read this.

*

Back then we were already no longer friends. Or, to put it another way, we had a friendship that was trailing into the abyss, a dark place that must sometimes form between friends and that does so under certain circumstances. That's how I've come to understand it: such friendships dissolve under certain circumstances. You wouldn't say it or write it that way; you wouldn't think to note that that is what happened to us, or that it could happen to anyone, anyone at all, those who walk the streets with their footsteps offset and no longer in sync, the couples found at night in restaurants visited beneath the waning moon. Your mind would never notice such things—not about us or anyone else—because your eyes were those capable of looking only inward, like there were mirrors you had placed over your eyelids that from the outside made it seem you had normal eyes, yet for you they were a mirror and nothing else. But you won't read this and you won't know and so it doesn't matter in what terms I express this fact; I can say it this way, or that, or any such way, the truth being that by then our friendship had dissolved and had approached the black abyss and there is no simpler way to express it than that.

For six months we had lived together, an amount of time felt far longer inside than observed under the scrutiny of any watch. During that time I would awake at dawn and leave before you knew I had left, taking the small number of steps that I always would, steps that could only be taken alone, for to walk them together would offer nothing, not to me or to you, the cadence of our steps no longer being correct. There were many birds in the trees. I remember that now. The birds would come in such great numbers, filling the branches as though each tree were a separate city, a kind of city of birds, their voices so loud that the traffic of the road was nothing compared to their endless calls. The days back then were blurry, filled with so little when I compare them to now, a daily repetition that seems almost laughable, minuscule, like an ant tirelessly eating away at a leaf without realising the very tree it walks across has many such leaves, each thick and green and different in its own way.

Would it fit? I remember you asking one morning whilst I was still there, and I looked at you, perplexed, struck by what you had asked, and I think at that moment I placed the bowl of cereal I held in my hand down on the kitchen table, the cereal only half eaten, the bowl not emptied and washed and left to dry, actions I would normally take before I left, the movement and process like closing off a sentence before beginning the next, the cereal remaining half eaten, the spoon protruding from the bowl like a metallic tail, all as you laughed at what I did, asking again, your tone too serious, whether I thought it would fit, whether it could fit, whether it was calculable that such would or could or should, and whether I had an opinion, like an opinion of this could be held between two who had slipped into the abyss, and I walked out, not saying a word, not answering what you asked, and even after I left you tried to call me, possibly to apologise, which I knew you would never do, not in earnest, it wouldn't be an apology, it would be baffled surprise at my actions, or you would speak as though it had never happened, that I was never even there, and perhaps you did call and perhaps I answered and then hung up, because all I can remember is the searing sun in the sky and the rare appearance of a cloud.

I don't know whether you would ask any different now. I don't know whether you have changed. It's possible you would say the same. It's possible that you would. But I don't know you anymore.

And I don't care, of course.

That's why I'm writing this.

Because you'll never read it.

Photo by C Dustin on Unsplash