Part two of Leaving, but the two can be read separately. It's just a look into an adventure our protagonist has after abandoning his wife and kids. Dedicated to anotherstraycat.


The bar closes at two o'clock as city law mandates. He leaves slowly, people before him and behind him in twos, threes, and fives, murmuring and laughing. There's desperation in the air and even though he is drunk, he can sense it. Between the slurs and the giggles, he can hear the abandoned innuendos and uncaught suggestions. He wonders how many people will end up pregnant tonight.

He is probably the oldest man in the area. These people, these kids, are in their early twenties, fresh from college or still in it, pretending at adulthood. He's been an adult and he can't understand why anyone would want to play such a silly game. Reflexively, he reaches into his pocket to check the time on his cell phone when he realises that he threw that out a week ago. He draws a hand across his chin only to realise that it has been four days since he last shaved. He doesn't even know where his car is.

Freedom is as glamorous as he had imagined. Countless dalliances with girls half his age, endless walks to nowhere, stars above and concrete beneath. He's left suburbia for the city and he drinks every night to remind himself that he likes it.

He wanders into an alley, destination unknown. His kindred are here; the ne'er-do-wells and left-behinds sleeping and shitting and eating and drinking in their shanties. He passes them and they pay him no notice. Just like his old family, they know to ignore each other. When he breaches the other side in a halo of light, he cannot differentiate this street from the last. Everything is the same - meandering twenty-somethings, clubs, bars, graffiti. He sweeps his head from side to side and his sight takes a moment to follow.

He finally sees one difference. Alone and away from the crowd sits a girl with her back against a streetlamp. She's shrouded in a black trench, knees to her chest, a span of white skin evident before it disappears into black shin-high PVC boots. Her nails are black and some sort of spiderweb pattern covers what little of her forearms can be seen. His middle daughter liked black nail polish too. Without rhyme or reason, he goes to her, pulled by something or nothing.

Now, he can see a collection of something beneath her that looks like motor oil but smells like blood. Her hair, he can see, is a bright red with blonde peeking from the roots. He stops, his shadow interrupting the light, and she finally looks up. Her skin is so pale that the streetlamp colours it yellow and the bags beneath her eyes are so stark that they dull the green of her eyes. The trench falls open a tad and he can see cleavage dipping into a netted black top. She is thin and lithe, he can tell; he is too drunk to know not to look. His gaze pans out and his attention falls to her palms. The spiderweb pattern on her arms isn't a pattern at all, he realises. Someone has carved the tree-branch design of her veins into her wrists.

"Got a light?" She asks, voice hoarse. Her speech is slow, every syllable stretched into two. This is how children talk. He tries to emulate it.

"Yeah."

"Got a cigarette?"

He gives her both, watching as she saturates the Camel filter with blood as she places it between thin, cracked lips. The lighter flicks to life and for a moment, she looks like a skeleton as the flame throws light across her face.

"You're bleeding."

"You're observant. I like that."

"Should I call someone? You're...dying."

He reaches for his cell phone again and it's still not there.

"No, don't call anyone. I did this to myself."

I did this to myself. He agrees.

"Sit down." She says. So he does.

He sits beside her and immediately, he can feel the droplets of blood seeping into his slacks. Or maybe he's imagining it, but it's there in some way or another. He shifts to sit as she does, knees to his chest, arms limp at his sides, knuckles against the pavement. She presses the cigarette to his lips and he inhales, tasting fruity lip gloss and blood.

"How old are you?" He asks after exhaling.

"I'm nineteen. How old are you?"

"I'm twenty-five."

"I'm sixteen."

"I'm thirty-seven."

She leans forward and turns to look at him, smiling gently. Her teeth are uneven, but he likes that. They stare at each other for minutes that feel like hours that feel like days. This is probably comfortable silence. But he's tired of silence because he's been living in it for twenty years.

"Why did you do it? Slit your wrists, I mean."

She shrugs enigmatically and laughs; it sounds like nails across a chalkboard. This, he feels, is a good answer. He says so aloud: "That's a good answer."

"There's not always a reason, you know." She shivers. "Man, it's cold."

Suddenly, he doesn't want to be here anymore. He doesn't want to be in this city he doesn't like with this girl he doesn't know. This girl he will never know. He takes off his coat and drapes it around her and stands. He wasn't imagining the blood on his pants. She is waiting for him to say something and he's waiting to say something too. He's looking for some sort of epiphany to pull from the ether. Instead, all he can think about is that he can still taste the lip gloss and blood. It's a very potent cocktail.

"Good luck with dying." He says, thinking to himself that he probably sounds very cool.

"Good luck with...whatever." She gestures "whatever" with her hands, grabbing and waving at the air. And he leaves.

***

For the next week, he spends most of his time looking over his shoulder, expecting to see her ghostly face. Or a cop. He can't decide which is worse.

Closure, he thinks. He needs closure because, even though he doesn't know her name, he thinks about her and her shiny boots and crooked teeth. He thinks about how he tasted her lip gloss and her blood on the cigarette; which flavour is more intimate? They shared something and, he decides, she's probably not dead. Even though he didn't call the ambulance, someone else did.

He sees her face in the obituaries. The picture blurs when he focuses too long, but he can recognise the smile and the eyes. At the time of the picture's inception, she was blonde. Sixteen. Abbie West. Sixteen. Tragically took her own life, etc., memorial service will be held at x time at x place.

When he goes to x place, he is startled to see people there. So many people crying, holding each other, staring into space as if they might see her there looking down, staring at the ground as if they might see her there lookking up. No one knows him and everyone watches him suspiciously - who is this stranger intruding on their mourning? - but they accept him anyway. They hold his hand during the prayers, they cry on his shoulder. They mistake his expression for grief.

He is not sad; no, she did that to herself. And sometimes there's not always a reason. But he is surprised. Not because she's dead.

Simply because she existed before him. She had a life before their first meeting. He cannot understand this because the same cannot be said for him.