The Ignored

But, as usual, I was wrong.

The apartment was dark when I got home, and it still smelled of breakfast. Faint traces of toast and egg and orange juice lingered in the still air. I reached next to the door and flipped on the light switch.

The living room was empty. Not just empty as in no people, but empty as in no furniture. The couch was gone, as was the coffee table. The TV was still there, but the VCR was gone. Both the ficus and the Boston fern were gone, and the walls were bare, all of the framed art prints missing.

I felt as thought I’d stepped into another dimension, into the twilight zone. An overreaction, maybe, but the look of the apartment was so shocking, so unexpected, that my mind could not focus on particulars, could only take in the totality of the situation, and that totality was so overwhelming that I could not put anything into perspective.

But I knew instantly what had happened.

Jane was gone.

I pulled off my tie as I hurried into the kitchen. Here again, things were missing: the toaster, the cookie jars.

There was a note on the kitchen table.

A note?

I stared down at the folded piece of paper with my name on it, stunned. This was not like Jane at all. This was totally out of character. This was just not the sort of thing she’d do. If she was unhappy, if she had a problem, she’d talk to me about it and then we’d fight it out. She wouldn’t just pack her stuff and sneak away and leave me a note. She wouldn’t just give up. She wouldn’t walk away from me, from us, from what we had together.

The first thing I probably should’ve thought was that somebody had taken her, that she’d been kidnapped by the same person who had ransacked our apartment.

But somehow I knew that wasn’t the case.

She’d left me.

I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. Maybe I had seen it coming but hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. I thought back, remembered her telling me that communication was the most important thing in a relationship, that even if two people loved each other, there was no relationship if they couldn’t communicate. I recalled her trying to talk to me for the past few months, trying to get me to talk to her and tell her what was bothering me, what was wrong.

I remembered the night at Elise.

We hadn’t really talked much since that evening. We’d fought about not talking a few times, she accusing me of emotional secrecy, of not opening up and sharing my feelings with her, my lying and claiming that there were no feelings to share, that everything was fine. But even our fights had been tepid, lukewarm affairs, not the passionate battles of the past.

I looked again at the folded square of white notebook paper with my name on it.

Maybe she would have told me of her plans to leave at one time. But we definitely had not been talking much lately, and in that context the note made perfect sense.

I reached down, picked up the paper, unfolded it.

Dear Bob,

These are the hardest words I’ve ever had to write.

I didn’t want to do it this way, and I know it’s wrong, but I don’t think I could face you right now. I don’t think I could go through with it.

I know what you’re thinking. I know what you’re feeling. I know you’re angry right now, and you have every right to be. But it’s just not working out between us. I’ve turned this over and over again in my mind, wondering if we should try to work it out or if we should just spend some time apart, in a trial separation, and I finally decided that the best thing to do would be to make a clean break. It’ll be hard at first (at least it will be for me), but I think in the long run it will be for the best.

I love you. You know that. But sometimes love isn’t enough. For a relationship to work, there has to be trust and a willingness to share. We don’t have that. Maybe we never had that. I don’t know. But I thought we did at one time.

I don’t want to place blame here. It’s not your fault this happened. It’s not my fault. It’s both our faults. But I know us. I know me, I know you, and I know that even though we’ll say we’ll work on our relationship, nothing will change. I think it’s better to say good-bye now before things get too ugly.

I’ll never forget you, Bob. You’ll always be a part of me. You were the first person I ever loved, the only person I’ve ever loved. I’ll remember you always.

I’ll love you always.

Good-bye.

Beneath that was her signature. She’d signed her full name, both first and last, and it was that bit of formality that hurt more than anything else. It’s a cliche to say that I felt an emptiness inside me, but I did. There was an ache that was almost physical, an undefined hurt that had no set center but seemed to alternate between my head and heart.

“Jane Reynolds.”

I glanced again at the paper in my hand. Now that I looked at it, now that I reread it, it wasn’t just the signature that struck me as being too formal. The entire letter seemed stiff and stilted. The words and sentiments hit home, but they still seemed familiar and far too pat. I’d read them before in a hundred novels, heard them said in a hundred movies.

If she loved me so much, why were there no tears? I wondered. Why weren’t any of the letters smeared; why wasn’t the ink running?

I looked around the kitchen, back into the living room. Someone had to have helped her move the furniture, the couch, the table. Who? Some guy? Someone she’d met? Someone she was fucking?

I sat down hard on one of the chairs. No. I knew that wasn’t the case. She was not seeing someone else. She would not have been able to hide something like that from me. She would not even have tried. That she would’ve told me about. That she would’ve talked to me about.

Her dad had probably helped her move.

I walked out of the kitchen, through the living room to the bedroom. In here the loss was less, but more personal, and all the more painful for that. No furniture had been removed. The bed was still in place, as was the dresser, but the bedspread and the lace doily covering the top of the dresser were gone. In the closet there were only my clothes. The framed photographs on the nightstands had been taken.

I sat down on the bed. My insides felt like the apartment — physically, structurally unchanged, but gutted, hollowed out, soulless, the heart removed. I sat there as the room darkened, late afternoon turning to dusk, dusk to evening.

I made my own dinner, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and afterward watched the news, Entertainment Tonight, and all the other shows I usually watched. I was paying attention to the TV, yet not paying attention; waiting for a phone call from Jane, yet not waiting. It was as though I was possessed of multiple personalities — all with conflicting thoughts and desires — and was aware of all of them at once, but the overall effect was one of numbed lethargy, and I sat on the couch and did not move until the late news came on at eleven.

It was strange walking into the dark, empty bedroom, strange not hearing Jane in the bathroom, brushing her teeth or taking a shower, and with the television turned off I realized how quiet the apartment was. From down the street somewhere, muffled and indistinct, I could hear the sounds of a frat party. Outside, life continued on as usual.

I took off my clothes, but instead of dropping them on the floor and then crawling into bed like I usually did, I decided to put them in the hamper, as Jane had always nagged me to do. I carried my pants and shirt into the bathroom, opened the plastic top of the dirty clothes basket, and was about to drop them in when I looked down.

There at the bottom of the hamper, rolled up next to one of my socks, was a pair of Jane’s panties.