Jonathan Ottke
Inspiration piece
If I Leave a Space
By Barbara Black
Response
He opened the sliding door to his balcony. Standing in the night air soothed him, made simple inhalation and exhalation his focus. Down on the waterfront a heavy chain was being unspooled from a winch. The moon spilled its light across the bay. Each night alone he felt the drag of possible abandonment. And now, looking across the water, the bright interrogating light on a crane was an eye watching to see if he’d break. This love couldn’t break him, he was sure. He still felt full of her, as if she had infiltrated every corner of his insides. He lit his second cigarette under the watchful eye. Something in the air passed by that put his neck hairs on edge—a swirling air current caught on the corners of the building, spinning like the pieces of a Van Gogh sky. How could he see it like that, the crazy painter? Did turbulence live in the tissues of his eyes? The feel of her breath was like that air. If only he could capture it, carry it with him in his pocket for the crueler days.
Night offered a kind of solace, a slowed sense of time. Down below, a tiny boat with coloured lights moved out from the dock. It looked like a glowing caterpillar sliding on a sheet of black. What was it she had said? “If I leave a space, it means I’m not coming back.” If I leave a space. He didn’t know what it meant, but she had said it forcefully. She had rearranged the room before she left and now he stumbled in it, like his body had forgotten its own parameters. He stood under the yellow wash of his balcony light hoping to expand into the blackening yawn of the city’s sleep. Ash dropped off the end of his cigarette and fell 20 stories below. Random pinprick lights in buildings in the business district, a dot here, a dot there, glowed from the inside. That was her touch, him being lit up like a light board, her skill in igniting sectors of his body previously unknown to him. One here, one there, and that was the glory of it, that they weren’t connected. The neon water caterpillar glided slowly, imperceptibly into the middle of the bay. He smoked his cigarette down to the filter.
With his third cigarette he was beginning to feel he was wrong about the night. Or at least this particular night. It wasn’t a solace. It had no beauty. It swallowed the stars and spread its black haunches over everything. All nostalgia dissolved inside him. The small dots of light now looked to him like the burning points of his anger and resolve. As night came to an end, more of them would come on in the offices and rooms, form a larger grid of illumination—the lights of day and industry, the unmysterious and necessary light. The world coming back to itself. Yes. The one thing everyone liked about her best—reckless spontaneity—he now realized irked him the most. It undermined his sense of order in his life. Constantly she rearranged the furniture of their relation, until negotiation was impossible. He butted out his cigarette on the railing, went back inside, and moved the furniture back to the way it was before. All the possibilities of the day were contained in the thin strip of dawn now leaking over the skyline.
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