bathtub reverie obsession window

It had been two minutes before Renata realized she had been staring into space still clutching the shower curtain. It was the goose bumps on her arms and the water droplets that were still gathering on the ends of her hair that jarred her from her reverie. Her trance had begun while still in the shower, obsessing over the events of the past three weeks with a microscopic focus, replaying every time lapsed wound that eventually led to the bleed out death of her relationship with Greg.

Greg, her liberal artist ex-boyfriend, had infiltrated her waking thoughts with a viral like efficiency. Thoughts multiplied and grew on each other like colonies of microbials growing inside darkened Petri dishes. He was the one that had stormed the fortress of Renata’s heart and shattered it’s walls with his wit, charm and they way he spoke with such (in her eyes at least) authority on the many subjects he seemed to have such a mastery of.

In Greg, Renata found a voice for the voice she never dared raise. He had ambition where she felt aimless, his confidence strident where she folded in on herself, he was charismatic where she was enigmatic. She had completed her degree in psychology four years earlier yet still hadn’t found a job in her field, nor experienced any sort of rush or surge of inspiration to do much of anything professionally.

She had been thinking of her last hour with Greg…how he tearfully lamented the “wilted flower of their love” as he looked deeply into her eyes, but then not much more than half an hour later was almost cheerfully explaining that he was going to move out west to stay with his brother and “sort through some things”. The fact that he didn’t seem too upset about the demise of their relationship irked Renata, that and the fact he was able to walk away under his own power; she resented him for his confidence, charisma, and direction that now seemed arrogant, smug and cruel.

Renata stepped out of the shower and began to towel off. She put on her bathrobe and walked into the living room to get her purse. She returned to the bathroom, opened her purse, took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, set the purse on the floor and then stood at the bathroom window, staring out of it. Despite the below-freezing temperatures, she opened the window about six inches, lit a cigarette and dragged on it, anxiously blowing the smoke out the window through the screen.

Setting the cigarette on the window sill she turned and walked to the mirror. With a furrowed brow and scrunched lips Renata regarded herself. She took a long lock of her hair and put it between her forefinger and her middle finger and began slowly combing it out and staring at her image in the mirror.

It was another two minutes before she realized that the cigarette had fallen off the windowsill and landed in her purse and was smoldering some old receipts inside.