I didn't want it to be like that (I go on peculiar guilt trips with him) so I approached, tray in hand, and casually asked:
'So you're staying for the holidays, then?' A look. Not as gripping as I remember.
The answer was affirmative, I responded that I was too, to finish my dissertation. He asked was I alone? - I said yes - and would I like to sit with him? I fumbled with some words in my mouth like 'maybe', 'should I', 'I don't know', 'yes' and next thing I know I'm facing him and his plate of curry turkey mixed with rice. Scooped up rice which he overturns onto the chunks of curry turkey as we're talking.
He looks tired. I ask all the questions I ought to ask and questions that interest me, because frankly I have been a bit worried and concerned and wanting to know what he's doing next year and how this year was going etc etc. I want to help him, weirdly, there's an instinctive tendency to want to care for him. I even thought I could help with the 3000 word essay. What on earth am I thinking? I try to be normal, I laugh and flail my hands all the while choking down everything I really want to ask which are of no purpose, whatsoever, anymore, I guess. But I don't want him to fuck up and leave this place. I want him to do what he has to do to stick around. And I've transcended the point where I want that for me. I'm over what has happened. I just want him to have his plans go as planned, whatever he planned.
Apparently I've left a black hoodie at his place. Do I own a black hoodie? He assures me multiple times that it's mine. Whose else could it be? It's mine, surely. It could be no one else's. This is relieving in a way although his words aren't the most reliable vehicles of truth.
I look at his bitten fingernails. Stumpy fingers. Watch. Palms as I remember. Everything the same.
'I didn't know you...' (the continuation of the sentence was lost somewhere between me feeling tense and me wanting to scream at him and me wanting to be just fine with him).
I said well of course you didn't know, I haven't spoken to you in two months, almost.
'You're right, yes...' he says incomprehensibly.
I don't know how to act in these cases. I want to be nice because I feel all these nice things about him but then my cerebral alarm rings and informs me of all the remembrance, it re-members the pieces of the puzzle which I've glossed over in my mind with his pretty blond hair instead of with the ugliness he spurted out one evening.
I can't eat my food. The chicken is fine, the rice is great (safest thing you can get in hall) and I am a big fan of sweet corn. But nothing will go down. I cannot eat. It's as if my stomach has forgotten it was grumbling of hunger only ten minutes ago. Am I so full of thoughts of him that I have no space for actual nourishment? It's a tingle, almost, from the pit of my stomach up my oesophagus, an emotional block of my physical functions. Not paralysis, but stasis, at least. I need to get moving. So I pick up my tray, after putting my coat on and replying affirmatively, almost authoritatively, to an awkward question whether we're going now.
I want him to be walking towards the same direction as me. He's not. Well, if he's not I better not look him in the eye then. Better turn round casually.
'I'm going to the supermarket,' he says, simply.
Turn around turn around sunglasses on head say something like: 'I'm off to the library see you, bye'. And walk away. Open the door, the short wooden door, walk down the stone steps, face the Wren, feel confused, go over your expressions in your head, trot on cobbles, get to library, open Walter Benjamin, read that and forget about it. Forget about him. He's in another place, altogether.
Damn it. I shouldn't have let my face drop.
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