Chapters

“Let’s play hide and seek,” she says.

She’s been lost to me for so long, I wouldn’t know where to start looking.

She’s trying hard, though. Trying to inject some fun, some humour, some games into our lives. She’s read that book about kick-starting your relationship. I found it under her side of the bed, a side that seems to have become both bigger and smaller and definitely further away. The games are from Chapter Four.

Chapter One prompted self-reflection. She’s a master of that, so she sped read and skipped and found herself at Chapter Two - List Making: One column for the good, one for the bad, make a tally and see how things are going. I knew, without seeing the list, that it hung heavily to one side. Chapter Three suggested we talk our problems through. She licked her fingers and scurried those pages away without reading, looking for an easier answer.

So here we are at Chapter Four and Fun and Games. I’m not supposed to know about the book, the chapters, what she’s skipped, what she’s deemed important. Right now I’m meant to find her spontaneous, captivating, like she was when we first met. Except she was never any of those things.

She’s determined to do this, wants me to hide first, hands me the scarf to obscure her vision, as if she saw anything clearly before.

Maybe I should try. One more chance. One more time. One more night.

Chapters

I place the scarf across her eyes, but my arms drop to my side, my fingers too confused to remember the knots that tied us together. The scarf drops to her shoulders, her chin drops to her chest, her eyes drop to the floor and she doesn’t turn to see me go.

I wonder if she’ll bother to finish the book, come looking for me when she gets to the end. I never finished it. I stopped reading after Chapter 9 – Letting Go.