The Preamble to a Polished Life Expectancy

"Wash your face.  I don't want to look at you like that," Sabrina said to him.

"Like what?" he asked, bewildered at the sudden abrasive nature of her voice.

"Your face is filthy, John!" she yelled.

"So?" he barked back.

"So!  So I don't want to look at that soot.  All it does is remind me of what you were doing before you got here," she said, as she took a seat in front of her vanity, readying herself for her nightly grooming before bed.

"That's a ridiculous thing to say.  We were all somewhere before we got here," John answered.

He knew they were no longer talking about his appearance or the two hours he was missing in action before he showed up on their porch.  She was waiting for him, already two bourbons in.  When he thought about it, he knew he was to blame for her intoxication.  There was no doubt in his mind that she had poured the other one for him.

"John, I don't want to do this anymore," she said as she powdered her red nose.  It was always red after coming in from the cold and she had been sitting out there for hours waiting for him to walk up the dirt path.

"What is it, Sabrina?  What is it that you don't want to do anymore?"

"This.  My life was meant to work out the way I thought it would," she said.

"And what way was that?" John asked, incensed at the idea, the notion that she had premonitions, likely many, that she never shared with him all these years.

"I don't know."

"You don't know, Sabrina?  If you don't know that, then how do you know what you don't want?" he inquired.

"That's all I ever knew, John.  You knew that about me," she said.

"That's not true," he exclaimed.

"Yes, it is."

"No, Sabrina.  There was a time when you knew you wanted me, when you wanted us.  There was that world."

She nodded, recalling a time when she spent more of the day smiling than not.  Her happiness seemed foolish now, as it often seemed to the one recalling it from the past.  Their happiness wasn't naive.  To call it that would be cliche and would be indicative of the foolishness itself.  It was shortsighted.

"Do we live in that world, Sabrina?  Do we still hold a home there, you and I?"

Sabrina knew that her answer to this question was irreparable.  Anything she said here would be held against her should they remain in each other's lives, even in the slightest.

"No, John.  I'm afraid we don't."  She walked over to him and kissed him for the last time.  He had water in his eyes, but true to form, he never once cried in front of her.  She leaned in and whispered in his ear while brushing his hair out of the way.

"Goodbye my knight.  We were lost if nothing else."

She turned to leave the room and just as she shut the door she found herself aimless and then immediately moved by her peculiar affinity for apathy when it came to their imminent demise.  Indifference about anything, let alone her marriage, was foreign territory for Sabrina, until this very moment.

"That's all it ever was," she said and turned down the corridor to the front of the house.