Indifference

There’s nothing as fatal as indifference, and H’s washed over our relationship like the tide. I had become a triviality to him, so we had to admit that our relationship was over. With no feelings to speak of, we had evaporated, so there could be no fixing, no healing, no understanding.

Trying to heal another’s numbness is like trying to build a sandcastle out of stars you can’t even reach.

Being a triviality hurt more than any of our arguments. Any pain I’d caused him was so long gone he could barely remember it. We’d missed our chance when rage evaporated and left a god-awful vacuum behind—and you know what happens when you get too close to a black hole.

The first time I experienced H’s feeling of not feeling, I felt mutilated. I remember him sitting back in a shabby old chair in the dining room, expressionless. I wanted to shock him into feeling something. I didn’t care what, as long as it wasn’t this, but it was too late. We were done. His heart closed inside of me like a moonflower.

Years afterwards, he painted that conversation, only instead of his indifference, he’d painted mine.

Maybe he thought I felt nothing that day. Maybe he mistook my pain for numbness. Maybe I mistook his pain for numbness. Maybe indifference never entered our relationship at all. Maybe we’d been reaching for one another for so long that we were just too exhausted to touch.

Looking back at all the paintings he made of me during our last years, I’m always facing away. Rolled up inside myself, staring out into a world that did not exist.

I remember sitting back in that wooden chair in the dining room, expressionless. Did he feel mutilated? Did he want to shock me into feeling something? How long had he felt that way? Months? Years? I’ll never know. We never built our sandcastle out of stars because we thought we couldn’t reach them, even though we could.