Excerpt from This Space Between Us

There’s a feeling to things slipping away with someone. It happens so gradually that the bits of progression toward the end, taken individually, are mostly invisible- only at the end does it all comes together like an Agatha Christie novel- but, if you close your eyes and reach out with your feelings, it’s all there; certainly in retrospect. She doesn’t respond to you like she did; she doesn’t have the same look in her eyes. These were things so strong and immediate at the beginning that you could have almost touched them.

Sex with her had felt choreographed. I guess they call that chemistry. The way our mouths would move in-synch; the way our bodies would entwine. Flowing from the bed to having her pressed against the wall in what felt like a single motion- the softness in her eyes during the pauses we’d take from kissing.

Your act will turn parody by the third month. You become Bob Crane flubbing his lines while doing dinner theater. To you, it’s all the same, but the audience will notice. By the time she was mirroring my pout, repeating my signature “baby…” with exaggerated emphasis, I should have known it was over. Dates went from fucking all night while forgetting about dinner, to fucking before dinner dates because who wants sex after? All deliberate clues that the attentive reader would catch on a second go-through, but indistinguishable the first time around.

I made up for my Christmas gag of only getting her gifts that were actually for me- the plaid mini-skirt, the perfume I wanted her to wear- by making Valentine’s Day selfless. A hand-written love letter and a movie gift card for her and her daughter- where they could, “talk about how great I am,” I joked in the letter. When she took the envelope she had a minor look of terror as she felt it thoroughly for the outline of a ring. Another bit of foreshadowing- now you know why Mrs. White had the candlestick in the study.

The last time I saw her I asked her to see me again. One last time would change things. “Why,” she asked, “what would that do?”

And, with that, we were strangers again. Slowly, over time, the person she had known disappeared. I had become a bag of guts wasting her time on a Wednesday night. I discarded the script we were using and started to ad-lib my own. I unplugged from our mixing board and fell too deeply into the lunacy of authenticity.

I had stopped being me.

FULL BLOG: This Space Between Us @ KTP