Storytime: "OUTNUMBED"

Outnumbed
by William Pauley III

This is a clean cut. I won’t be thinking of you again.

Edgar leaned back in his seat, but never took his eyes off the page. It seemed to be glowing—no, glistening—there on the surface of his writing desk, from the moonlight spilling in through the window. He’d just written the words, but did he actually mean them? Was any of it the truth?

He crumpled the page and tossed it in the bin, then grabbed his pen and tapped it lightly against his teeth. Four taps later, he was writing again:

You approached me, remember? I’d already told myself I was finished with relationships. I was okay with living alone. For the rest of my life, I would’ve been fine. MORE THAN FINE. But you… you came into my life like a fucking wrecking ball. It may be a cliché, but it’s fucking true. You forced your way in. I tried avoiding this. In the beginning, it was you who pursued me. You can’t forget that. You were persistent and I eventually gave in to your charms. What I guess I’m trying to say is… this isn’t all my fault. How it ended, I mean. It didn’t have to come to that. Things got ugly, to say the least. I got ugly. I don’t like myself when I’m with you. You bring out this… rage… a rage so deep I never even knew it was there until I knew you. That rage, Tara. It isn’t me. The real me, I mean. And now that I’m alone, it’ll never be me again. It’s over. I’m taking my things and moving out of the city. This entire apartment reeks of you, and every bookstore, every coffee shop, every fucking segment of sidewalk will remind me of you. I just want to forget you, Tara. I need to forget.

Without even reading it over, Edgar again crumpled his words and dropped them in the wastebasket at his feet.

The next day, he broke the lease to his apartment, quit his job, and withdrew every last dime of his savings. He called up a realtor and bought the cheapest house they had listed—a tiny, rundown shack, somewhere in the woods, just outside the city. He slept in his car at a nearby campsite until the day he was handed the keys to his new home.

He never moved a single piece of furniture out of his old apartment.

It was just one of the lies he’d written on that day.