"It was just something that I had to do."

"But why?"

"I had to. You wouldn’t understand; you weren’t part of it."

"I could understand if you explained it to me."

"You wouldn’t. You couldn’t possibly understand."

"Tell me."

"Okay. I’ll tell you. I lived with that man for years, Ant, years, for the best part of my life and it was horrible. I never felt right in that house and it was because he lived in it and I want him to know that I’m better now and that he messed up."

"This was years ago."

"I’ve spent more time with him than away from him. That’s got to count for something. And I can’t forget--"

"Forget! Forget about it! You’ve left, you’re away, you’ve escaped; let it go! This is the past and I’m, I’m you--"

"You’re my future. I know. "

"Then why are you…obsessed with the past!?"

"I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him and that house."

"No, no! You’d been gone a long time before you met me."

"You don’t understand."

"But I’m trying."

"Yes. And I love you for it. But he was the one who thought I couldn’t do it. He thought I could never be myself."

"He was wrong."

"That’s just the thing. I’m wrong. He thought I could be myself. He just always said the opposite. He loved me in some way. I didn’t realise it until I left--

--Say something."

"You want to be back with him?"

"No! No, don’t be stupid. I can’t go back…"

"But then why did you go back today!"

"I’m not going back! I’m leaving! I’m leaving for the first time and I’m making sure he knows why I left!"



                            *                   *                   *



     The old man had a face like a tombstone with an overgrown, grassy beard. Aged eyes wearily read the letter on his kitchen table. The address said, To my husband.

     He had not heard from his wife in a while. Not since abuse and names over the breakfast table, yelling over the TV and hushed silences when his son and daughter-in-law came to visit and driving off while she stood in the countryside calling out his name, RAAAAY, RAAAAAY, RAAAAAAAAY! Not since tears in her eyes and walking past the bathroom and the sound of soft sobbing echoing down the corridor and the bitterness in his own eyes now, swelling up and growing and opening a new bottle of whiskey and drinking it all that night.

     Not since a family meal with hard words and raised voices and the chicken flying across the room and thick gravy spiralling off onto paintings and I DON’T NEED YOUR PERMISSION TO LIVE MY LIFE AND, AND I WILL BE SOMETHING YOU BASTARD OLD COOT and now he was sitting down in his chair breathing heavily and holding the table edge tightly.

     The letter stared at him. There was nothing else inscribed onto it. So she must have delivered it by hand. He carefully read over the letter, hoping to see distress in her script; a wavering in the loop of the ‘y,’ a shaky ‘s,’ something to let him know it caused her some great emotion to write it out.

     Nothing. The letter sat on his kitchen table for some time.

     Yet, when he went out into the garden to pull up weeds and ignore the letter, he could see it. It watched him as he ripped them up from between the patio slates. It watched him as he ate his sandwich for lunch. It watched him as he made his cup of tea. It watched him as he did the crossword. It watched him as he sat outside in the middle of his garden, crouching down and holding himself as he sobbed into his knees. The house was haunted by the letter for three days until he yelled some primeval moan and ripped open the envelope to see what she had written.

     To see her explanation.

     Nothing.

     There was nothing apart from one photo, and one small piece of paper. The photo was of his wife, with another man. Were they married? They couldn’t be, he supposed. He had forgotten the expression on her face because he had not seen it for a very long time; it was a smile. And he knew it was because of the other man, and from somewhere long ago he recognized the smile. The warmth in your soul and the radiating bliss that reached out and pulled a smile from your mouth into your shining eyes.  What a perfect picture. What a paradox: that such a blissful portrait could create such sadness inside him.

     The piece of paper had one sentence etched carefully onto its surface:

i am the intimate mistake in your corpse-grey eyes.

     And then there were tears on the table soaking into it's old wooden surface.

"It was just something that I had to do."