Where did all the fruit go,” she says to herself. If this were a film we’d see a long shot of a door from inside a house. A minute or so would go by before a woman enters through it, but instead of heading inside, she stops immediately after closing the door behind her, calls out a name, and waits for a response. The response emanates from what sounds like upstairs, and her eyes move in that direction, slightly left upward of the camera facing her. She says she is leaving to whomever is at the top of the stairs (we’ll say it’s a man), she is not sure why, but she knows she must. This decision is not irrevocable, but necessary nonetheless, she’s sure of returning, but not certain when that will be. Without waiting for a reply, she opens the door again and leaves. The camera has remained in place the entire time.
Outside the world looks different. She feels liberated yet confined by the immense size of her surroundings. A nausea builds up inside but quickly dissipates upon her realization that nothing is really wrong. She is scared, but it is an excited sense of fear, one of potential, and slowly she takes her first step towards discovery. Breathing in and out, she cannot decide what to do first with her newfound freedom. A coffee shop a few blocks away seems right.
Inside she scans the place, finding an open booth, but opting for one that is occupied by a man, young at that. Good looking, clean cut, well dressed, he looks wrapped up in his coffee, but not enough that an approach would throw him off guard.
You are alone, things are going fine, perhaps, but you’ve always envisioned something more, something insane, adventurous, yet how to manifest this desire is beyond you. She speaks lucidly, laconically, every word specifically chosen. The young man looks perplexed at this woman standing above him, but he is obviously intrigued. Without saying another word she walks away very slowly, and fifteen seconds need not go by before the young man is dropping money on the table and following her.
We can see them in bed, naked and sweating, evidently content with themselves. The young man tries to start different threads of conversations, but none succeed. He quickly understands that she has no need for words, that her desire for him is merely flesh, her search involves no exchange of emotion beyond what is created sexually. It all worked out like a heated short story, like a film, but now that he was here, he felt empty, and could only imagine what she was thinking. Before leaving the hotel room he asked her name. She exhaled a lungful of smoke and walked naked into the bathroom, closing the door behind her.
The wind cuts across her body, her skin vibrates. She has never felt this sensation before. So elated, and not because of the sexual encounter, but because of her ability to do it. She can still feel the dullness of her home, still see him sitting across the table eating the food she prepared without so much as a compliment. She still feels violated by his stares of blatant sexual desire, but the tables have turned. She has fed on the lust he exhibited throughout their relationship. With a stranger no less. And with no room for remorse, her skin vibrates.
(What could this swelling of desire to be alone, to be without the comfort of home possibly mean? She knows that even though she cannot stand being with him, leaving him somehow seems out of the question. They’d met in a luscious setting, the atmosphere teeming romance, of course, and as the camera performs a gallant tracking shot through the party, he and she majestically enter the frame, eyes locked from the onset. With less than three sentences shared, they knew they’d found perfection. But the misery of time seeps through everything. And when he started coming home late, ignoring the subtleties of marriage that make it last, and when he couldn’t even compliment her damned lamb, she felt the pang of change instilled. Yet a force so strong is still muffled by the security of habit—what element made her need to leave imminent?
Honestly, it’s impossible to say. I, for one, don’t have the insight to expound. I am a mere observer, and hope that you too can leave judgment or speculation out of what I present. For if we cannot observe the frailty of living, the precarious nature of events unfolded without casting our own wicked estimations and opinions, what then can we learn? If in the end she leaves him for good, or if she returns, can we truly deem either action appropriate or silly? Can we view this as nothing more than a representation of possibility that this could potentially happen to anyone, thus we need not be concerned with ethical presumptions?
Nothing is really wrong with her husband; her leaving is not really his fault, or hers. It is simply a necessity, she must do it. What force would possibly create this need? Yes, he has faults, but she is is acutely aware of her own. She knows she cares more about her own work than their relationship at times, and it bleeds through so blatantly that she can’t help but feel ashamed. And yet this changes nothing. So what compels her to leave!)
She feels complete, and it’s impossible to know how long her journey lasted. But cut back to the scene of her abrupt departure. This time the camera is upstairs, watching a man and a woman have sex. There is moaning and the suction sound of wet bodies pressed together, pulled apart, pressed together, pulled apart. Then we hear a door open, and the man starts up right away, telling the woman to stay quiet while he grabs a shirt and underwear. He hears his name called. The camera follows him to the top of the stairs. We don’t see who he’s looking at (though by this point in the film we know who), but we hear someone tell him that they’re leaving him, and while it’s not permanent, she knows she must. Dumbfounded, he says nothing as she leaves, and after a minute or so, slowly turns around and heads back to the room where he was just fucking a beautiful, meaningless person in his life, and thinks, perhaps says out loud to the woman still naked in his bed, “That was close.”
Isaac Johnson is a senior Media Studies Major and a Literary writer for Generation.
