Chapter 1:
SHARDS OF ICE
My hands shook. This was how it felt to be so outraged that one became. Mad.
I stared at the shattered glass between our bare feet.
Items of clothing strewn across our living room floor like the broken pieces of our relationship.
I asked him again, “what do you mean you’re leaving?”
His cold blue eyes, which I used to think I could un-freeze, grazed the mess on the ground warily, “I found out about you and Tom. I found out about the job. I might as well live my life, and you might as well-,”
“what!?” I cut in, realizing now that my tears were freely running down my face, even though I always tried to hold them back, “might as well, what Lee? Live my own life? In another country? With another man?”
I looked away my skin crawling. I suddenly felt ashamed of being nude within Lees apartment. I felt like I might as well be using the shards in the middle of this argument, and dig out my own heart, to show him my commitment, at the very least.
“I don’t even talk to Tom anymore,” I added after a deep breath, trying to sound strong, but hearing the words as weak and maybe a little calm. As if I had really given up.
“But we haven’t even dated for three months Jackie and you and Tom were together for a year.” He sounded like he had rehearsed this moment. As if he knew every word I’d say like it was written in a script.
I looked back to the past few weeks, trying to find signs where we were falling apart, where our love-making turned from passion to a need of avoiding problems. “Don’t you love me anymore?” I whispered.
I tried to find the knot in our golden ribbon of perfection but came up empty handed.
“Of ‘cause I love you, that’s just it though. If you weren’t the girl that I thought about daily and dreamt about nightly, then I would keep you selfishly. But to love is to let them go sweety.”
Lee took a careful step toward me, his long limbed legs barely moving in comparison to his body, but somehow closing the gap.
I looked up to him now, the distance warming our bodies again but not with the same energy it used to.
Was this it? The kink in our road?
My body was rigid from shoulder to toe and yet Lee seemed relaxed.
This made me only more upset.
“If you love someone and let them go, you should know that they’ll come back to you if they love you too!” hostile arms gripped Lees biceps, and my mind went blank.
A fever from my head pulsed like a drum and all the air in my body seemed trapped within my lungs. I was trapped.
Trapped In a surge of pure negativity.
All I could feel was the burning in my ears.
Then very gradually I started to fall.
Iron hands pulled me down and something sickly-sweet forced oxygen back into me, my chest moved up like a heavy boulder being lifted, then gently back.
The heat on my skin shifted to noise, first muffled together.
Then more recognisable, something that I hear a lot, voices.
Only these weren’t the ones from any lips I knew. No family, nor friend. No Lee.
My nightmare blinked back into my mind like a distant memory. Only as I felt my eyelids open and took in the fuzzy surroundings above me I knew it was in some way from a true event.
I tried to see defined shapes, but everything mixed like starry-gel and smoothed out back into another world. A world of ice.
-
My ankles bent awkwardly into padding of the leather skates. Lees fingers brushed my exposed calf only to tuck my thick wool trackies into my socks.
As if feeling my transfixed gaze he looked back at me and I felt my heart race.
It had been almost 22 months since I had felt this way about anyone, and for it to be shared with a stranger, should have been my first sign that this wasn’t going to be double-sided.
Although in the midst of everything, my offer to work in New York for a publishing company and my new hobby for dancing on solid water, I had forgotten Tom and found Lee.
He worked at the rink, and my friend Alicia introduced us on my third lesson.
Since then we had gone on one date and knew only a little bit about each other.
Somehow I had learnt the little things that made Lee… Lee.
Whenever he was nervous his eyes would drop and his hand would silently click as if to cue words from his mind to mouth.
Lee also hated to swear and he never seemed to lose his cool.
All these things I’d learnt over spaghetti Bolinas and red wine.
Now the shy actions that were this incredible man turned me on in the most intimate way I could recall. He really was something different.
I was his patient and he was the asylum.
It was crazy.
-
After an hour of coming to I stared outside watching the snow fall like slow-motion rain.
My chair felt somehow comfortable even though it was a wooden surfaced piece.
My stomach lurched bringing back to reality, but my heavy eyes stayed glued to the Winter-works of nature.
It should have been a trigger but it left me only too tired with emotion to really allow my inner demons to respond.
In some ways I could just watch this all day… in some ways that could kill me.
Being dead inside already, made everything seem like an infomercial on tv; muted with a product resembling a hairbrush and a fork.
Only Ariel from The Little Mermaid would be interested in that.
I rocked back, not enough to actually tip over but enough to broaden my view. Not that the white walls on either side did much but frame the world outside.
But that’s all this was. A picture within a frame. Now old and collecting dust behind a bicycle wheel in an attic.
