THE MESSAGE

DID SHE SEE his lie he wondered finding himself again drawn back into idle thought, eyes focusing on a middle-distance blur. He had certainly considered his actions thoroughly, in an idle sort of way. It had been and remained his intention right up to the point he knew not to kid himself, c’mon, it ain’t gonna happen, that simply the right bar of numbers on the lighted digital clock had steadily increased to such a number that leaving, exiting to attend her event, was laughable: it would take him 70 minutes to arrive – the event begins at 7:00pm sharp – it was now 6:08pm – now 6:12pm, and he decides to begin drafting a text in his mind to send her to explain – by 6:23pm the mental drafting had been put to writing in a message he worked on on his mobile phone – by 6:28pm he knew it, the message, was overcrowded with too much punctuation that smacked of craft – by 6:38pm he had cut the six short sentences down to two, removed all pronouns and, he felt, hit on a nice rhythm of two strands, each containing three clauses, lapping on each other like waves – after a little more idle contemplation, sitting there, at his desk in his subterranean bedroom, a mixture of Marlboro Light tobacco blended with neighbourhood marijuana, his face caked in E45, in the pastel evening light, weakly refracted through closed metal blinds, at 6:43pm, he searched her name in his phone’s address book, found it (he thought again how it was odd that he had included her surname when saving her number originally) and, after a moment’s more idle debate, at 6:45pm, sent the message.