a forty sixth story...'things were broken'

Things were broken, didn’t feel right.  Celebration days all gone, belonging to an irretrievable past, the night.  Time had wiped them out, now time was moving too slowly.  The house, quiet and empty, ringing of loss, traffic outside the window, hushed, lowly.  Life, once alive with possibility, chance. 

Piotr took a long drag on his cigarette and stirred his coffee, reflected.  He knew what was missing, but not how or where to make any kind of rediscovery.  Change was necessary and yet change was hard, carried with it risk, and perhaps the prospect of failure; hoping, waiting were easy, perhaps a mistake.

Jeanne.  Why it turned out the way it did no longer mattered.  Where she was now, living somewhere in London with someone, or no one – no, someone, mattered.  And so did the courage to get in touch, so too the shame of it being a last resort, a sense of guilt, of being unhappily alone.

He wanted to phone, Piotr, at that moment, more than anything: anything, anything, anything, but he had been cursed with an imagination.  In his mind’s eye, she was getting ready to go out, beautiful, made up, his call, a cry from the wilderness, met with disdain or worse, indifference.  Piotr carried his baggage around with him, slept in the same lived-in clothes, felt like a burden on the people he loved, his love sharp as a needle, with a measure of pain.

Piotr’s face was long, thin, expecting rain, there was red skin under his eyes, he rubbed them too much.  His weary eyes, dark, sad, the light extinguished, gone out.  Jeanne.  He longed for her once loving touch.  She had been his torch bearer, the Olympic flame.  Jeanne, electric blue. He loved her so much.  For Piotr, things were broken.