A Reprehensible Christmas Decoration

Should I have wanted my character to appear outside of herself, I would have invented a better term for this condition. I wanted her to be analytical of the situation around her but not as though she were stringing together a list of memoirs into a conceivable and somewhat emotionally reprehensible Christmas decoration. No. I wanted her to be aware of the feelings that hung listlessly in the air but not speak of them in the way a nihilist teenager understands their place in the universe; alone and original. She was not.

She woke this day surrounded by people she had known her entire life, as her life had not truthfully started until the day they were all born. She was always told that her place in the world was accentuated by the family she belonged to, if only until the day she decided to leave. She had, the day before, been writing about the utter destruction of the earth due to an overbearing sun, and found no interest in including a mooing whale in the story she already saw to be going nowhere. He, in turn, found no interest in her story at all. And so their conversation ended.

She woke this day surrounded by people she had known her entire life, and felt little if not no affinity with. No, she felt no attraction between her antigens and their antibodies. It was simply the one day of the year in which she had to allow her favourite antibody to spend time with his opposing antigens, on the other side of the country. It was, after all, the celebration of the birth of Jesus, a man she too felt no affinity with.

She woke this day to some level of panic. It was a hot day, like every other day in the northern Summer, only it was a very early hour and not at all a time for daylight. But there was daylight. There was an immense daylight. It burnt through everything around them. The rain covers on their tents began to change from silver to a burnt form of plastic that stank through the already heavy air. She ripped at her clothes, not caring that nobody had seen her body for the last three years. She ripped at her clothes, imagining that it would not matter as she must be dreaming. What else could explain such an odd change in weather? Certainly not science.

The person you are calling cannot be reached. Please check the number and try again.

She repeated these words in her head, knowing they were only a memory of years before. She knew that phone companies no longer recited these words as it was not in good public relations to claim that the customer had made a mistake. She just had not bothered to listen to the new messages as there was no point, so she always hung up. Either way, his phone was off. Or out of service. Or broken. Or lost. Or something.

They drove through the heat, assuming that some sort of freak wave had affected the place they had been sleeping, and that the rest of the world remained in beautiful tropical wonder, as there was no life outside of North Queensland. There hadn’t been since the family trip of 1989 when they apparently visited the snow, not that she could remember. There would never be a life outside of North Queensland, not for them all. Certainly not together.

When she was afraid she would write letters to him. She would intend to tell him all the things she never would say, but the letters would turn into lies, and then into stories, and she would let him read them anyway because they’d never say the things she didn’t want to say. They would say the things that someone else would say. He would laugh and say she was full of shit, and she would assert that everything she said was the absolute truth. If he never knew when she was lying, he would never know when she was telling the truth, and they could live in gregarious silence. A family that never spoke. Lovers that never made love.

Six months later they finally ran out of food. The televisions had long ended and the radios only worked at one time of the day, letting the masses know that there was little more hope than there was the day before. He was gone, and her books were filling up with letters never that would never be sent, like the lyrics of some long forgotten aspirant punk band. Six months later and the water had stopped a long time before, and the release of a heat stroke related death was becoming more and more viable.

Their car was covered in video cameras and the windows were blacked out, to hide them from the giant explosion too many light years away to witness. They drove and drove to find some solace. Something to fill their empty stomachs, and at the risk of sounding cliché, hearts. The clouds had cleared up months before, but the rain had never stopped falling.

She ran to finish her story. To become a character. To become a number who felt her skin burning as she graced his eyes with one last moment of her presence. His phone may have ceased to call, but he never stopped playing number games, waiting for her to return. She was dead, and he was alive. And he never once wrote or read a letter. He never once heard the rejection tone of trying to call her back.