Decisions

"But how do you know it is the right choice?" she asked.
"When you are afraid", you replied, toying with the engagement ring on your finger. The coffee was growing cold by then, and I tried to fade into the broken wall, before you could spot my fading makeup, red lipstick that had turned to brown, giving me the grotesque look of a clown past her prime. She noticed it on her way out - but then, she always did have a knack for noticing precisely the things you wanted her to miss: the creased sleeve, the small tattoo around the ankle. "It's not so easy", you said, "we must be forgiving", but the anger boiled up inside of you; "Apres moi, le deluge", the king of France said, but I knew I would be out long before then, in a city where I had learned to roam the streets in silence.

I almost wish I had stayed. Now, sinking back into a life defined by fear, the worst versions of myself are reflected in broken mirrors. I used to think sometimes, that they were angels. But now I think I have been placed in a secret asylum, and I feel insanity knocking. What is a little water, a few raindrops sprinkling my head like blood on the altar, compared to this desert in which I dry up like a root, in which I turn into a raisin? I have beautiful, polka-dotted rainboots. I could have worn them to protect myself from you. I suppose I still would need a rain-coat, but no doubt you would provide me one, late at night, when you were sick of folding laundry, and I was too caffenated to care. "Be careful that you don't get wet", you'd say, and I would laugh. "It's not even raining outside." "You never know".

Yes, I never know: I never know when the rain will come, or when I will feel lonely while looking at a sculpture of a dead person, by a dead person, in a museum full of living bodies. I never know when I will think of you, and I don't know if you still think of me. But I do know that I am no longer afraid of getting splashed.