““The eccentricity of human nature and human communication always interested him, amused him even. It was one of the things we had in common.””
We were at the café, seated outside at a table under a parasol as the sun began to cloud over, and he told me that he didn't know where the time went. That he felt it coming loose in his hands. He looked to his hands as he said it, to emphasise the point, and waited for me to do the same, following his gaze. Which I did, automatically. Although later, thinking about it, I thought what a strange thing it was for me to do, and for him to expect of me. It didn’t seem serious, any of it, and yet at the same time I could feel he was moved by my obedience in that moment. I reminded myself to discuss it with him the next day, thinking he may be interested. We’d planned to go pick up a second-hand bike he’d bought from an address nearby. He didn’t drive, and so I was to give him a lift there and, if there was room, we’d slot the bike into the back of the car and take it to the bike shop he frequented to have it serviced. The eccentricity of human nature and human communication always interested him, amused him even. It was one of the things we had in common, and had led, I imagine, to us becoming lovers. I pictured us discussing the gesture and my reaction, clinically, almost like a scientific evaluation, but smiling as we delved into the motivations and causes.
In the end I forgot to raise the idea with him. Besides, that day at the cafe when he asked me to look down to his hands, happened to be the last opportunity to talk to him for some months. Afterwards, he stopped answering my calls, choosing instead only to communicate via short, precisely worded texts. The wording was concise and direct in an attempt by him to remove vagaries and confusion, he explained. Although, of course, they proved to be the opposite. Isolated assertions that didn’t seek engagement or response from me, just acknowledgement, they lay sort of flat on the screen as I read them, lifeless. THE WAY WE PROCESSED OUR FEELINGS WAS SELF-DEFEATING. YOU PRESENTED AS A DIFFERENT PERSON WHEN WE MET. OUR WAY OF LOVING EACH OTHER WAS TOXIC. The past tense was clearly deliberate, and by the act of reading them I felt consigned to his past, which may have been the intention. He liked words, he’d always said. Valued them. He said once that words were the only thing we as people had to trust, because our acts were often inexplicable. I think I nodded, but I didn’t understand what he’d meant by it.
When I did remember about the gesture of the hands, it was the day we had arranged to swap our possessions. This was at the end of the summer, and he had spent that time teaching a workshop in Turkey. He was very tanned when we met, but he had lost weight, too, and his face looked drawn. He stood some distance away from me, I remember, and I retained my distance, too, out of politeness. We had become polite again since we’d last met. The possessions were merely things we’d left in each other’s flats, knack-knacks. We acted very soberly and matter-of-fact, given the circumstances, and I suppose that’s why I was reminded of that odd gesture with his hands. Because here we were doing something that had great emotional pain, at least for me, and yet we were acting as though it was a very mundane affair.
He had arrived on his bike, and he quickly pulled my items from the panniers without feeling the need to explain or build up to the exchange. The few t-shirts and blouses were crumpled, I noted, and I suspected that one of the blouses had been taken straight from his laundry basket without being washed. I imagined he had put them all in a bag somewhere some time ago, awaiting this day. Perhaps it had been as far back as the evening after we’d had lunch at the café all those months ago. They felt unclean, my things, somehow squalid. He hadn’t gone to much effort in presenting them, whereas I had made sure to iron and fold his clothes and place them neatly in a canvas tote bag, along with some books of his. The other things, a toothbrush, deodorant, some chapstick, I threw away, because it would have seemed somehow petty to return them to him. That’s how I felt anyway. Petty was the word that came to my mind then, but now I question it, believing there must be a more accurate word. He had put the toothbrush I had kept at his flat in a mug I had left there, too, which was printed with a joke about grammar we had both been amused by. He handed it to me, the mug with the toothbrush inside. There was as well my hairbrush, an almost empty bottle of perfume, even some hair clips. He handed me these items separately, and waited patiently as I tucked them inside my handbag. I hadn’t thought to bring a second bag for my own things, having assumed he would have brought them in something other than his bike’s panniers. Soon after leaving him, I put all the items, including the clothes, into a nearby litter bin.
At home that night, I texted him a thank you for meeting me, and made sure to mention how I appreciated him keeping my things to return. I thought of the gesture of his hands again, hesitated over whether I should write another text, asking him about it. I wondered about other gestures he had performed in our time together. He could be theatrical, physically. He would climb trees to impress me. Or I felt his intention was to impress me, but perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps he climbed trees spontaneously, even when alone. I found that hard to believe, though. Sometimes, he would clap his hands when he was feeling happy, or clap loudly to punctuate a joke he’d made. It was a very loud, sudden noise, and unexpected, but it made me jump and laugh at the same time whenever he did it. He was exuberant and extrovert when we were alone together, but in company much of this confidence would leave him. At parties or in restaurants with friends, he would become subdued, and sometimes, not often, I would feel a little embarrassed to be with him. Saddened, too, because he didn’t seem happy in company, and I wanted him to be happy. He would set the table with the knife and fork with their positions reversed, the knife on the left and fork on the right, because he said this was how he was taught at his school. He would grind his teeth at night, just as he was falling asleep. In the mornings, he would run to the bathroom before he kissed me, to gargle with mouthwash. His fingernails were never neat or clean. Purposefully mismatched shoelaces in his trainers. The way he’d curl my hair around my ear, when he’d be leaving. It became a gesture, but with a meaning I wasn’t sure of. If there was a meaning, which there may not have been, of course, although he did it so precisely and so often that the significance was implied. Repetition implies significance even when there is no meaning. I would say, I love you, and he would call me beautiful. He didn’t say the words I wanted to hear. I wondered if it was the symmetry he hated, because words were so important to him. Rhythms. He tried not to mirror movements. He hated clichés. His hatred of a cliché was a cliché in itself, and worried him.
During our time together he had often expressed disappointment when I failed to keep in touch with him during the day, texting and emailing and the like. He wanted to see me express, he said, spontaneous curiosity in his life. This was how relationships should be, he told me. He said he didn’t feel essential to me. So I made myself a cup of tea and sat down at my kitchen table and texted him. I mentioned the gesture of the hands, and my automatic response to it, and said I felt it was interesting. He didn’t reply until almost eleven that night, when I was in bed and reading. He texted, THANK YOU.