Chapter 4 2 Her disappearance.Photos disappear.Disappearance of petticoats

After she went back, I drank another can of Coke, took a hot shower, and shaved.Soap, shampoo, shaving cream, everything is running out. Come out of the shower, comb your hair, apply some lotion, and clean your ears.Then go to the kitchen and reheat the rest of the coffee.There was no one sitting across the table.I kept staring at the empty chairs, and I felt like a child, left alone on an impossibly unfamiliar street that might appear in a Giorgio de Chirico painting.But of course I'm not a kid anymore.I sipped my coffee without thinking about it, took a long time to drink it, paused for a while, and then lit my cigarette.

I haven't slept for a full twenty-four hours, and the strange thing is that I am not sleepy at all.Although the whole body is in a trance, only the mind is like a skilled aquatic animal, turning around and aimlessly in the complicated waterway of consciousness. While looking at the empty chair, I thought of the American novels I had read before.After the wife ran away, the husband hung her petticoats on the opposite chair in the dining room for several months.After thinking about it for a while, I started to think that was a good idea too.Although I don't think it has any effect, at least it feels much better than a pot of withered geranium bonsai.Maybe the cat will be more calm because of her things.

I opened her drawers in the bedroom one by one, and each one was empty.All that was left was an old scarf bitten by bugs, three hangers, and a few packs of insect repellant.She took everything away cleanly.In the past, the small bathroom was full of small cosmetics, hair curlers, toothbrushes, hair dryers, inexplicable medicines, sanitary products, boots, sandals to slippers, all kinds of shoes, hat boxes, jewelry in one drawer, leather bags, shoulder bags , suitcases, ticket wallets, underwear, socks, letters that are always neatly organized, anything that smells like her, nothing was left behind.It even made people think that even her fingerprints were wiped clean.About a third of the bookshelves and record racks were gone.Those were books and records that she bought herself, or that I gave her.

Opening the photo album, she took away all of her photos.In the photos I took with her, she just cut out her part neatly and took away, leaving me alone.The photos of myself, the photos of landscapes, and the photos of animals remain unchanged.Collected in those three books is the perfectly trimmed past.I am always alone.In between, there are pictures of mountains, rivers, deer, and cats.It's almost like when I was born, I was alone, and I have always been alone, and I feel that I will continue to be alone in the future.I closed the photobook and smoked two cigarettes. Although I thought why not keep a petticoat or something, but of course that was her problem.Not that I should be blabbering.It was her decision to keep nothing.I have no choice but to obey.Perhaps as she wished, she had to think that she never existed in the first place.And where she doesn't exist, her petticoats don't exist either.

I soaked the ashtray, turned off the air conditioner and the radio, thought about her petticoat one more time, gave up and went to bed. It's been a month since I agreed to a divorce and she moved out of the apartment.This month means almost nothing.A trance, as if there is no entity, like a jelly that is neither cold nor cold for a month.It didn't feel like anything had changed, and in fact, nothing had changed. I get up at seven in the morning, make coffee, make toast, go out to work, have dinner out, have two or three glasses of wine, come home and lie in bed and read for an hour or so, turn off the lights and go to bed.I don't work on Saturday and Sunday, but I go to several movie theaters to kill time from the morning.Then, as usual, eat dinner alone, drink, read, and sleep.In this way, just like some people blacked out the numbers on the calendar one by one, I passed a month.

Her disappearance, I feel in a sense as if there is no way.What has happened is what has happened.No matter how good we get along these four years, it doesn't matter anymore.It's like a photobook where the photos have been taken away. Same with this, she and my friend slept regularly for a long time and just moved in with him one day, even that wasn't a huge deal.Such things are so likely to happen, and in fact often happen, that even if she had become like that, I do not in any way think that anything special happened.After all, it was her own problem. After all, that is your own problem.I said.

It was the Sunday afternoon in June when she filed for divorce, and I was playing with the tab of a can of beer on my finger. You mean you can leave it or not?she asked.Very slow to say. Not all can.I said.I'm just saying that's your problem. To be honest, I don't want to leave you.she said after a pause. Then don't leave.I said. But, it's okay to be with you. She hasn't said anything since, but I seem to understand what she's trying to say.I will be thirty in a few months.She is almost twenty-six.And what we have built in the past is really insignificant compared to the magnitude of what is supposed to be coming.Or it can be said to be equal to zero.We literally spent those four years eating through our savings.

That's almost entirely my responsibility.I probably shouldn't have married anyone, at least she shouldn't have married me. At first she thought she was a social misfit.And I am a social adaptor.And we all played our roles more subtly, respectively.However, when the two of them thought about whether they could continue to act skillfully in the future, something went wrong.Although it's just a very small something, it can't go back.We're at a gentle, elongated dead end, and that's where we end up. To her, I was already the lost one.For example, if she still loves me somehow, that's another question.We're so used to each other's roles.I have nothing left to give her.She knew it instinctively, and I knew it empirically.Neither side was saved.

So she and her petticoats disappeared from my eyes forever.Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, and some things die.And there is little tragic element in it. ◇ July 24th, at 8:25 am. After checking the four digits of the digital clock, I closed my eyes and fell asleep.