I tried experiments. “You leave me.” Okay, I won’t leave. Fracture happens over some small glitch, and she’s voided. So, I’ll hang out. I’ll read, write, rest in close proximity to you. Not leaving. Four hours later, she returns for a repair, but she doesn’t understand the concept. She’s still got hurts and complaints to work out with me, and she starts with, “You need to not leave me.”
Um.
Yes, if this was a thing. I’m going home, to my home, to feed my two cats. To breathe back in my own space. This is a woman who can’t be apart from her tiny dog for more than a few hours. The dog, lovely dog, was part of the reason that over three months she spent time at my house only three times.
“You said it didn’t matter anymore,” she complained when I tried to discuss it weeks later. “Yeah, my feelings are changing about it.”
“It’s just easier.”
“Yes. For you.”
“Now you’re trying to start a fight.”
“No, I’m trying to establish a baseline of understanding between us. The imbalance is no longer convenience or effort.”
“Why do you always do this?”
“What, negotiate?”
“Fight? Get angry?”
“I’m not fighting, dear. I’m trying to understand what the repetitive fracturing is teaching me. What I am learning about you.”
“Now, you’re doing that thing. Lecturing me.”
“I am?” I examined my body position, my tone of voice, and the expression on my face. “I have no idea how to communicate with you any longer. Something is usually wrong with the way I am doing it.”
“Why do you always do this?”
“Talk?”
“Fight!”
“Not everything is a fight. A frustration is not a fracture. Unless one of us keeps being tripped into the void of panic and isolation. I know you know how to do self-sufficiency.”
“He traveled so much. I don’t mind being alone. Every time you leave me, I am sort of relieved. I begin thinking about my house, my chores, my way forward, alone.”
“That’s a good result.”
“Accepting a walk and dinner with a friend is easy for me.”
“And when he becomes creepy and hovers around you and your family, when you didn’t invite him?”
“We were just talking. There’s nothing to be jealous about.”
“Yeah, not jealousy. Why are you telling me this story of a near-neighbor who invited you to go watch the bats and why you said yes, on the first night of our latest breakup?”
“If you didn’t break up with me. Leave me.”
“I go home. I get upset, yes. But that’s part of learning how to relate to each other. If minor frustrations turn into relationship-ending breakups, well, that’s not a carnival I’m interested in supporting or attending.”
“You and your fucking metaphors.”
“I apologize. The words don’t always work.”
“We’re better when we stay in bed. We don’t fight with our clothes off.”
“True.”
“But why do you have to fight about everything. And then spend the entire day pouting.”
And with this, she exposed her own blind spot. I was not upset. I was not breaking up with her. I was frustrated, like a child who’s mom tries to show him how to play Candy Crush for the first time. She wanted to curate my experience of her Instagram posts. She interrupted me. Tried to correct me. “You’re reading the wrong post.” I showed her the phone. I was reading the right post. “Don’t get mad.” Um…
That was around 2 pm on the day I thought the world had ended. All I wanted to do was reconnect with her, the love of my life. Temporarily. No longer. Fuck.
By 7:30, she was back in her bedroom, demanding that I confess my transgressions. I didn’t go for the bulldozer method. “Nope. I’ve been here. I didn’t leave. I wasn’t pouting. I enjoyed my day and the wifi. I invited you to a number of adventures we could’ve shared. You had different ideas.”
“I’m busy. I can’t just lay around in bed all day. I start my job soon.”
“I was not pouting. I had a lovely day. I was sorry for your roaming your own house for things to do. Chores. Anything to keep you from talking to me about what was a simple “complaint” that you turned into an all-day sucker? Now, you’re booting me from your house. Why?”
“Because you don’t know how to talk to me. How to not yell at me. How to not leave me or make me feel uncomfortable.”
“Okay.”
“If we have no plans for the night…”
“I was trying to make plans…”
“You are such an angry person. You don’t even like me. Why are you here?”
“I love you. I’m trying to puzzle through these glitches to refind my beloved.”
“She’s gone.”
“I see that.”
“Your anger…”
“Fuck that. I’ll leave. No worries.”
“You can’t talk to me like that.”
“I am leaving. Five hours into a triggered afternoon for one of us. A pleasant afternoon for one of us. Can you tell which of us is upset.”
“Get out.”
I was packing.
“Yeah.”
dig into the deeper meaning with the Cloud Pilots
> back to index: proofs of life
Look >> There’s a new Facebook Group on *hyperfiction*
© 2026 john oakley mcelhenney, all rights reserved
dig into the deeper meaning with the Cloud Pilots
> back to index: proofs of life
Look >> There’s a new Facebook Group on *hyperfiction*
© 2026 john oakley mcelhenney, all rights reserved
