In Thin Air

I imagine her disappearing, I'm not sure why, but I do. One day when we are out, I'll turn my back, in a bookshop maybe, I'll get a little too engrossed in something I pick off the shelf perhaps, I'll turn too many pages before remembering where I am and when I do she will no longer be there. I'll walk down each aisle, look behind every shelf, imagining that she is doing the same for me and this is what keeps us from finding each other, that if one of us just stood still for a moment then the other would come round the corner, but neither of us will because we are scared the other is. I keep looking, she has evaporated but I keep looking. I call her phone and she doesn't answer, I call her phone and she doesn't answer, I call her phone but it's switched off. I have a strange feeling in my stomach, a crunched nervousness. I should stay where I am, I think to myself, she's just gone off for a moment and she'll be back, just to the toilet, or to pay for that photography book she was looking at. She has left me, I tell myself, I have to find her. I think I should stay right where I am, she's just gone off to ask one of the assistants a question, and she'll come back just as soon as he points the way to the biographies, or art history. She has left me, I tell myself, and I have to find her. But it is too late because she has left me.

We are lying in bed one night when she turns to me. 'I've got a feeling you're going to leave me, you'll disappear, I won't know anything about it. One minute you'll be with me, beside me, standing beside me, the next you'll be gone. Maybe I'll be looking in a bookshop, and I'll find a book, and I'll start reading and when I turn around you'll be gone.'

'I am not going to leave you.' I say, but one of us is, and soon. We both know, we are kidding ourselves, pretending that we don't, but we do. Each day our departure date creeps closer, each minute is one less that we have to spend together. We don't know what the event will be, a car accident, a mugging and misunderstanding, a gas leak and a sparking match, but it will be soon. Our bodies are preparing themselves for the loss, no one knows who it's going to be, perhaps both of us, but certainly one of us. I look at her eyes as they flicker across my face for signs or hints. But she is looking in the wrong place, our angel is hovering in the room, above us, around us, it seeps into our minds and sends premonitions of the separation waiting to occur.