A Time to Say Goodbye

She looked around the bedroom to make sure nothing would be left behind. The closet door rested half open, revealing a stark white back wall broken only by the silhouette of a half dozen empty hangers. On the dresser, next to his pictures and jewelry box, the thin covering of dust was interrupted occassionally by patches of clean wood where her perfume jars, pictures, and items of sentimental value had once stood. She'd left the picture from their most recent annual trip to Cancun. That's where things had gone from bad to worse, and she didn't need to bring that memory with her.

She crossed to the bed and closed the top on her overly full suitcase. She struggled with the zipper, but somehow managed to close the luggage item without catching any clothing in the tiny metal teeth. She took the suitcase and left the bedroom. Walking down the hall she paused to look into the bathroom. A room they had once so lovingly remodeled. Hours spent painting, retiling, repainting, and eventually loving. Then she remembered the fights in there about having children, not having children and the miscarriage.

She continued down the hallway and down the stairs to the kitchen. She looked at the counter tops, one corner stained by a drunken night of Easter egg dying from their first year of marriage. Her eyes rested on the refridgerator littered with magnets. Magnets that once held pictures of family, vacation, and the first research abstract she'd written (and received high praise for) in graduate school. And her eyes were inevitably drawn to the wall beside her. The small, but ever present chunk of plaster missing from the night before when she'd thrown a coffee cup in her frustration.

Leaving the kitchen, she intended to pause in the living room long enough to remove the house keys from her key ring and place them on the coffee table beside her note. But her eyes rested on the piano in the corner. The piano he had bought her even though he claimed to dislike the Chopin she was so fond of playing. She remembered how his eyes always contradicted his words, filling up with tears everytime she played the opening strains of Claire de Lune.

Tears filling her own eyes, she quickly left the room and headed down the narrow hallway to the front door. Opening the door, she half-smiled at the familiar squeak it's hinges made. This was the only goodbye she would hear on her departure. It was almost as if the house was saying, "Please don't leave." She pushed the lock on the handle and pulled the door closed behind her.

As she walked to the car waiting for her in the driveway, she pulled her sunglasses out of her coat pocket. She put them on to cover the black eye, and put on a smile to cover the pain.