So I rushed home on friday night, the way the rest of the world does. Still cant shake that home freedom feeling I have had since my teenage years. Crank up the music on my way home and for the first time in ages, I take The National out of my cd player and play something more...vociferous...I opt for something a bit more back in the day and it seems natural to choose The Clash. Sun mocks me, makes me feel reassured that the early evening brings happiness and I know now that I could never read that sun correctly. So I wind my window down, the fool I am, and I am certain I let myself smile. I am certain of it now I think of it. It felt good and I knew that for the first time in ages, I was actually going home.
The feeling and the music and the should I stay or should I go had rocked my soul so much I think I was almost drunk on it. I stopped at that florist, the one she used to love and I bought her favourites, a whole big blue and white bunch with special pretty paper wrapping. Laying on the passanger seat so innocently and fresh, I wondered how anyone would find the will to refuse such a wonderful gesture. It's fair to say that sometimes I think I love those flowers and that kind of gesture more than the reality of actually giving them to my wife. Why can men never keep flowers for themselves, romance animate.
As I parked the car, the only way I know how, badly, I rushed to the front door with my tummy full of feathers and a smile wanting to twist on my lips. Bounding through the door I had this strange notion that she would sense the romance and poetry in my soul, the way she had done all those years ago, I had the notion she would see it and fall back in love with me again. Visions of a cottage and some sick homely Walton's feelings danced in my mind as I remembered papering the hallway with her when she was pregnant with our first child.
The time it took for me to walk to the kitchen, I had realised that she wasnt home. No one was home. It was a 'note on the fridge night' and in that moment I prayed some disease would cripple that Australian whore for charming my wife away from me! In that moment my blood was acid and the flowers stabbed through my eyes stinging as the mocking sunlight had tried to do earlier. Daughter at her friends (yeah right), son at his granddads and wife...helping her friend unpack...picturing her in scruffy old Levi's with her pale pink vest on. I know that's the one she would be wearing...I picture her with those whisps of hair, catching her eyelashes before she blows them away. Sweating...they would laugh and make love in that mess. Abandoned and am I too old to be an orphan? Am I too old for social services to rescue me and give me to a loving family?
The flowers sat on the work surface and I thought it would be apt to let them stiffen and droop there for her to find them. Only fitting for the bin and who knows, maybe I could get back on with some paper work, maybe the office wasn't the worst place to be on a friday night.
Back to The National and Slow Show for the drive through traffic back to where I had come from in a lot less of a hurry.