Nearness of departure

He was a happy man. The kind of happy a man is when he pitches the tent right. He mowed the lawn at just the right time; he did not prioritize an afternoon nap and he had a timetable for emptying the dustbin. He did not quite complain when it rained on a picnic as long as he felt accomplished about the directions; he made his bed everyday right after he woke up and closed all the jars after he cooked, closed them all the way. He was an assured man. The kind of assured a man is whose life isn’t the sum of his anger or his failures.

But tonight a brand new feeling was about to temporarily fracture his orderliness. Especially the orderliness of his interior. A ceremonious dinner among the oligarchs called for a crisp suit he had neatly picked out earlier in the day. The flightiness of his cuff -links kept slightly bothering him but he let it not distract him much.

He had come to find comfort in his wife’s unstructured demeanour. He had acquiesced to the occasional ruffle of her pasty blue dress (a colour he was not particularly fond of). She barely combed her hair, she just threw them together. It mildly perturbed him; he measured his daily salt intake even. She used the word “love” way too oft; sometimes he hated when she ran the water a little too fast for his comfort (splashing droplets on the edges of the basin) and insisted on rolling the windows down while driving on the highway.

He watched her from a certain distance, her hair still wondrously held together by a flimsy clip. The tiny rivulets streaming along her champagne glass (he would have killed them with a coaster). And a closeness she exuded he had never seen before, as she talked to that stranger. Her eyes sparkled with the blissful longing like that of a postcard's. He liked to think she knew the stranger from her past, but his emotional arrangements stopped him from delving into possibilities. There was such careful aberrance to her body language, a musical irregularity in the bounce of her lashes and her fingers gently squashed the rivulets every now and then.

Krall’s Departure Bay played faintly in the back. The song had an entire season contained in it. An entire season of departure, detachment, disentanglement. He righted his cuff-links and quickly hid the doubtful looking water-circle with a coaster.

art - Diana Krall, Jazz Portriats, oil on canvas

artiste - Merryl Jaye

image url - here