I Keep Going

I know why I'm going. I could say I don't, and for most of the last week I did say that — to Simon, to Marta, to the text chain with my brother that I let go dark after his third question mark. But I know. I'm going because I told Lise I wouldn't, and she believed me, and I have never been able to let a promise stand between me and the person I made it to.

The board says the 23:46 to Sheffield is on time. Platform 4. I've got forty minutes to kill in a station that never really closes, where the fluorescent lights make everyone look slightly ill and slightly guilty. A man in a suit is sleeping upright on a bench with his Tesco bag looped around his wrist. A couple is having the kind of hushed, intense argument that happens when you're too tired to shout but too angry to stop. And I'm standing here, clicking a mint tin, because in four hours I'm going to knock on Lise's door and she is going to open it and I am going to see her face do the thing it does when I've let her down — a kind of quick, private rearrangement, like she's tucking something away — and then she'll say my name in that flat way she has, the way that makes it a fact rather than a greeting, and I'll have to explain why I'm there.

I can't explain why I'm there. I've tried. In the shower, in the car, lying awake at 2 a.m. with the ceiling doing its slow spin — I've run the scene a dozen times and every version ends with me saying something true and useless, like "I didn't want you to be alone" or "I saw the date on the calendar" or just "Lise." None of it works, because none of it undoes what I said six months ago, which was that I'd stay away, which she needed to hear, which I meant.

I meant it. That's the thing I keep coming back to. I sat across from her at that terrible café on the Gray's Inn Road — the one with the plastic vines and the coffee that tastes like it was brewed in a sock — and I said the words carefully, because I'd rehearsed them, because I knew if I didn't rehearse them I'd say something else entirely. And she nodded, and her eyes did the thing where they get very bright without quite spilling over, and she said "Okay, Max. Okay." And I walked out and I didn't look back and I've been walking ever since, if walking is what you call what I've been doing.

What I've been doing is not walking. What I've been doing is circling.

The mints are making my mouth feel chemical. I put the tin in my coat pocket and walk toward Platform 4, because standing still is starting to feel like a decision I don't want to make. The station's cathedral roof arches up into darkness, all that Victorian ironwork painted pale blue, and the announcements echo in that particular way that makes every destination sound like a summons. I've always liked trains. I like the impersonality of them, the way they ask nothing of you except a ticket and a seat. You can be anyone on a train. You can be someone who isn't going to Sheffield at midnight to undo a promise he made in good faith.

But here I am.

The platform's nearly empty. A woman in a red coat is reading a paperback with the cover folded back. A young man with enormous headphones is staring at his phone, mouth slightly open. The train isn't here yet, but the sign says it's coming, and that's enough for now. I find a bench near the middle of the platform and sit down. The cold comes up through the metal slats. It's July, technically, but England doesn't care about technically, and I'm wearing the wrong coat.

I think about calling her. I pull out my phone and look at her name in the contacts — just "Lise," no photo, because I took the photo off six months ago in a fit of something that felt like resolve — and I let my thumb hover there. If I call, she'll answer. She always answers. Even now, even after everything, if my name comes up on her screen she'll pick up, and she'll say "Max" in that careful, neutral voice, and I'll have to say something, and whatever I say will be wrong because it's always wrong, because I'm calling instead of being there, or I'm being there instead of staying away, or I'm doing the thing she didn't ask for instead of the thing she did.

I put the phone away.

The rails are humming now. You can feel it before you hear it — a kind of vibration in the platform, in the bench, in the soles of my feet. Then the light, sweeping around the curve of the track. Then the train, gliding in with that heavy, deliberate sound, all brakes and compressed air. The doors open and nobody gets off. I step on, find a window seat in the second carriage, and sit down. The carriage smells like cleaning fluid and faintly of someone's takeaway curry. Outside, the platform slides away and then we're in the tunnel, the windows going black, my own face reflected back at me.

I look tired. I look older than I did six months ago. I look like someone who's about to break a promise he meant to keep, and who hasn't figured out a good reason for it, and who's going to do it anyway because the alternative — staying home, going to bed, waking up tomorrow and knowing Lise is waking up alone on a day she shouldn't have to be alone — feels worse. It might not be worse. It might be exactly what she wants. But I can't know that unless I'm there, and I can't be there unless I go, and so I'm going.

The train surfaces into the night and the window fills with the orange glow of London thinning out into suburbs, then industrial estates, then darkness with occasional lights. I lean my head against the glass and watch the world smear past. Somewhere in the Midlands it starts to rain — sudden, hard, the drops streaking horizontally across the window. The carriage is warm but I can feel the cold on the other side of the glass, and I think about Lise's flat, the way the radiator in the hall makes that knocking sound, the way she always leaves a light on in the kitchen. I think about the date on the calendar. I think about the café, the plastic vines, the way she said "Okay, Max. Okay."

The café. I've been back there twice since that day. Not on purpose — or not entirely on purpose. It's near the office, and there are other cafés near the office, better ones, ones that don't make you feel like you're drinking regret in a conservatory. But I went back. The first time was a month after, and I sat at the same table, the one by the window with the wobble in the left front leg, and I ordered the same terrible coffee and I waited for something to happen. Nothing happened. The plastic vines hung there, dusty and indifferent. The coffee was still bad. I drank it and left and felt precisely nothing, which was worse than feeling something. The second time was three weeks ago, and I didn't even go in — I stood outside with my hands in my pockets and looked through the window at the table, and a woman sitting there looked up and caught my eye and I turned away too fast, like I'd been caught doing something shameful. Which I had, I suppose.

I close my eyes. The train hums on. In three hours I'll be in Sheffield. In three hours and twenty minutes I'll be at her door. And when she opens it, I'll have to say something true. I don't know what it is yet. But it won't be "I didn't want you to be alone," because that's not true — or it is, but it's not the whole of it. The whole of it is something I haven't said to anyone, something I've been circling for six months, something I might finally be tired enough to let out.

What I remember most about the day I left is not the café or the coffee or the way her eyes went bright. What I remember is earlier. We were in her flat, the morning before, and she was making toast in the kitchen with the light on — the light she always leaves on, the one over the stove — and I was standing in the doorway watching her, and she wasn't looking at me, and she said, "You're going to do it, aren't you." Not a question. A fact, like my name in her mouth. And I said, "I think I have to." And she nodded, still not looking at me, and she buttered her toast very carefully, all the way to the corners, the way she does, and she said, "Then you should go now. Not tomorrow. Now."

I didn't go then. I stayed another day, and we had the conversation in the café, the one I'd rehearsed, and she said "Okay, Max. Okay," and I left. But the thing I keep coming back to, the thing that circles and circles, is that she asked me to go then, and I didn't. I made her do it twice. I made her be the one who was left twice.

I open my eyes. The rain has stopped. The window is still wet, the lights outside smeared into streaks. The carriage is quiet now, just the hum of the train and the occasional rustle of someone turning a page or shifting in their seat. Across the aisle, a woman is asleep with her coat pulled up to her chin. Further down, a man is working on a laptop, his face lit blue. I think about what I'll do when I get there. I'll walk from the station through the quiet streets, past the park with the broken gate, past the corner shop that's always open, past the house with the dog that barks at everyone. I'll stand outside her building and look up at her window, and if the kitchen light is on — and it will be, she always leaves it on — I'll know she's awake, and I'll buzz her flat, and I'll wait.

She might not answer. She might look at the intercom screen and see my face and decide, for the first time, not to open the door. That's her right. That's what I gave her six months ago — the right to not open the door, to not pick up the phone, to let me be the one who's standing outside in the cold with no answer. If she does that, I'll wait a while, and then I'll go. I'll find a hotel or I'll sit in the station until the first train back, and I'll go home, and I'll know, finally, that the door is closed, that I can stop circling. That would be something. Even that would be something.

But if she opens the door — when she opens the door — I'll have to say something true. Not the truth I rehearsed. Not the careful, meant words from the café. Something underneath those words, something I didn't know I was carrying until I'd carried it for six months. It might be "I'm sorry." It might be "I was wrong." It might be just her name, the way she says mine — a fact, not a greeting. I don't know yet. But I'm going toward it, and the train is carrying me there, and the light over her stove is on, and I am tired.

The train rocks gently. The rain keeps falling somewhere behind us. I keep going.