Some Truth
A month had passed since I agreed to the divorce and she moved out. A non-month. Unfocused and unfelt, a lukewarm protoplasm of a month.
Nothing changed from day to day, not one thing. I woke up at seven, made toast and coffee, headed out to work, ate dinner out, had one or two drinks, went home, read in bed for an hour, turned off the lights, and slept. Saturdays and Sundays, instead of work, I was out killing time from morning on, making the rounds of movie theatres. Then I had dinner and a couple of drinks, read, and went to sleep, alone. So it went: I passed through the month the way people X out days on a calendar, one after the other.
In one sense, her disappearance was due to circumstances beyond my control. What’s done is done, that sort of thing. How we got on the last four years was of no consequence. Any more than the photos peeled out of the albums.
Nor did it matter that she’d been sleeping with a friend of mine for a long time and one day upped and moved in with him. All this was within the realm of possibility. Such things happened often enough, so how could I think her leaving me was anything out of the ordinary? The short and the long of it was, it was up to her.
“The long and the short of it is, it’s up to you”, I said.
It was a Sunday afternoon, as I dawdled with a pull-ring from a beer can, that she came out with it. Said she wanted a divorce.
“Either way is fine with you then?” she asked, releasing her words slowly.
“No, either way is not fine with me”, I said. “I’m only saying it’s up to you.”
“If you want to know the truth, I don’t want to leave you”, she said after a moment.
“Fine, then don’t leave me”, I said.
“But I’m going nowhere staying with you.”
She wouldn’t say anymore, but I knew what she meant. I would be thirty in a few months; she would be twenty-six. And if you considered the vastness of the rest of our lives, the foundations we’d laid barely scraped zero. All we’d done our four years together was to eat through our savings.
Mostly my fault, I guess. Probably I never should have gotten married. At least never to her.
In the beginning, she thought she was the one unfit for society and made me out to be the socially functioning one. In our respective roles, we got along relatively well. Yet no sooner had we thought we’d reached a lasting arrangement than something crumbled. The tiniest hint of something, but it was never to be recovered. We had been walking ever so peacefully down a long blind alley. That was our end.
To her, I was already lost. Even if she still loved me, it didn’t matter. We’d gotten too used to each other’s role. She understood it instinctively; I knew it from experience. There was no hope.
[From: Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase]
