Not once in her life had she ever, for even a fleeting moment, wished that she couldn't read. But now, the thought came as a flicker made of dread as her eyes settled on the first two words, and she struggled through the assurances that blissful ignorance might offer her. That was already an option that she had decided against, which was why she was reading this at all; and the longer she let the idea linger, the more likely she might do something foolish.
One word at a time was a helpful approach in the beginning, when words were safe, like 'hello' and 'Mimsy'. Words that she had known for her whole life, and had plenty of time to understand. It always worked so well for her to examine and observe everything as separate pieces instead of a whole, but only in the initial stages. She never seemed to learn, and breaking everything into tiny pieces consistently became the cause of her failures.
It was no different now.
The singular words were no longer safe when they became words like 'boyfriend'. Written in Kostya's print. Her stomach lurched, and her mouth was bitter, twisting her face into a reflexive look of distaste.
This was not a note that qualified how he was
gone. It was a note that explained how she was alone.
Alone by her own devices, which had not been deployed with this in mind.
That had been her critical mistake, and she could not recreate this environment. She doubted she could replicate it in
any capacity. It had so easily created itself in the beginning, when there was no question that this was how things needed to be. Kostya was considered a constant, as simply as she considered herself a constant, but neither of those felt like a constant at all now. Everything that she assumed was working had not been functioning at all, and her inattentiveness to anything that might have been a signifier of this was disappointingly negligent.
There were no constants left. No controls. Both were disrupted by catalysts she couldn't quite place, but they had both definitively not remained unchanged: Kostya was gone, and she didn't know who she was anymore. Her own lack of uniformity had been a cause for concern, but
this...
She dropped the note and put her chin on the mattress, her empty stare unfocused and blurry. It was wrong. The note was wrong. She wanted to calmly go down to the basement room he now inhabited (instead of the room he should have been inhabiting) and inform him of that fact, but she couldn't (wouldn't) move. It felt much easier to blame that physical excuse than address the actualities and realities, the truths that she’d so quickly negated in her mind.
It was easier, because ultimately, the only statement that was truly inaccurate was that this wasn't the end of anything. This was a change that brought an end. This was the end to all primary evidence of the first significant connection she ever made. This seemed dangerously close to the end of that connection entirely. She curled inward, pressed close to the frame of the bed, and it was only when her cheek brushed something wet on the sheets that she realized she’d been crying, which only made it worse.
This was the end to every truth she knew. There was no more anchor to reality here. The world she felt grounded in was the world of daydreams and dubious realities, and the world of verity was so far out of her reach.
It might have been that way for quite some time, but it was only now, when she felt fractured and alone, that she saw how far down this rabbit hole she had slipped. In spite of all of her efforts, her lies to herself, her struggles against the inevitable, she’d fallen very, very far.
Kostya was gone. Her tether to the place of sensibility was broken. The only thing she had achieved had been to crawl to the bottom, which was such a painfully long way from the top.
(‘And when she had tired herself out with trying, the poor little thing sat down and cried.’)
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