Red

What I so greatly feared happened. My boyfriend left, and with him he took my red hat.

And not just any hat might I add, the one I kept lying in the bottom of my suitcase; my travel hat. “Why? Did he travel?” asked my grandmother Edith. “No”, I replied “he just left”. It had been a very still night, the ground was still damp from a recent downpour and he and I had eaten bone dry chicken on a bed of dehydrated broccoli. The television was on mute as our incomplete video game stood on standby, and the CD to which I cooked our parched dinner had played its last track. The dishwasher was full and the flowers watered on top of the stagnant water I’d added a few days back. He paced the living room, a wild cat in a caged enclosure, lifting in his wake the dust that had settled and my heart that had not. This silence which feigned comfort was thick with untold storied and unrealized wishes. The man in the room would never reveal his, the woman, however, would break the silence with a trite ‘what’s wrong’? Even the furniture in their 8 * 6’ living box knew the answer. This was a conversation which had been on loop for a while now, always prompted by the evenings settling into nights. He would answer: “What…What’s wrong?”, she would offer: “You know what I mean”, which inevitably ended in: “no, I don’t”. But in tonight’s performance of their scripted three-line scenario, there was a twist. Tonight, he would decide that he did know what she meant, that he felt the same appetite for melodrama as she did. Tonight, he would star in a romantic drama of his making, featuring his monologue. And she would sit and cover her legs with the living room quilt, arrange the remote controls on the sofa by her right thigh in order of size. And he would speak. She would carefully select a strand of hair and slowly roll it around her middle finger, and then, slowly, unroll it. And he would speak. She would reach for her manicure kit and apply her cuticle softener. And he would speak. She would unplug her laptop and open her browser. And he would speak. And then silence. In the second act of tonight’s ‘improv’, he would search for a suitcase to pack his belongings. And she would stand up, concerned. He would reach for his smaller bag, and then decide on hers, bigger. She would stagger towards him in disbelief. And he would speak again, in interjections hurried by his urgent packing. He would pack the essentials as well as his ukulele. She would stare as the ukulele arranged itself on top of a hat in the bag. And he would walk out the door faster than she would catch up. He’d be gone without further words. She’d be left with no memory of the conversation. She would return to her sofa, to the ‘remote’ and the cuticle softener, and the memory of their last trip together, the one where she wore a hat to shield her head from the sun. It was a red hat, she remembered clearly.