"I'll Follow The Sun"

If you should decide to read this entry:

Keeping this window open, open a new internet window and look on MySpace music for the song “I’ll Follow The Sun” by the Beatles. Play it. Read from this point on.

A record spins in its player. Newspapers surround the antique looking apparatus in the warmly lit apartment. The wood blinds are slatted open and the orange setting sun shines through, leaving a sequence of bright and dark linear patterns on the wood flooring.

The walls are bare and dirty in places his hand prints had polluted in all the common places he would lean while talking to her after a hard day at work. A box populates the open floors that she stands on. She looks around her at the picture frames and packing materials on the floor. A picture of the two of them in a sweet embrace, some old love notes and movie tickets from various dates surround her. She looks at her hand, the mark of the ring still present on her finger. She runs that empty hand through her hair, exhaling in bereavement.

She walks into the hall between the bedroom and the bathroom. A bare mattress stares her in the face. She freezes for a moment to confront it, then continues into the small restroom. No towels inhabiting the rack and no shower curtain upon the rod. She opens the medicine cabinet she already knows is empty, looking herself in the eye as she does. It’s spotless. “And now the time has come/and so, my love, I must go” the song echoes her heart. As she closes the cabinet, she has a slight grin upon her face, though a tear kisses her cheek.

With a last look around, she realizes that what she is looking for is not going to be found in any cabinet or upon any wall of the apartment. It was gone and no matter how long she searched, the answer would not be found. She returns to the living room, unplugging the record player and placing it, the last of the pictures, and the unused newspaper a into the empty box on the floor. A dispenser of khaki packing tape runs over the top of a crisp new box and seals it. She leaves the gold key on the lit up and otherwise cheery window ledge, and the somehow-romantic image stays imprinted in her memory. She reaches towards the front door.

“…And though I lose a friend/ In the end you will know/ Oh/ One day you’ll find/ That I have gone/ But tomorrow may rain so/ I’ll follow the sun” the song finishes in her mind. She turns the bottom lock for the last time and closes the door behind her. With the crisp crunch of the door setting sturdily between it’s frame, everything has ended. Her dragging footsteps are heard as she walks reluctantly down the concrete stairs and through the gate of the courtyard with a grin on her face.

Life isn’t ending. It has just begun.