entry 17 - Matilda

Matilda was crying, sitting on her computer chair. On the screen, on top of the picture of them both, there was the IM window, his cruel last words still there and the cursor blinking.
"Sorry but I don't really like you. I don't think I ever did"
He was offline now, he went off seconds after saying that, probably afraid of seeing what she would say. But she wouldn't say a thing. She couldn't, her hands were shaking and she was feeling pain, feeling sick. That ended up being the only thing she did that day : cry. Dinner didn't even cross her mind, and she dragged herself to bed only because her back was starting to hurt after so many hours sitting in the chair.
The day after, she got up of bed, took a bath and dressed in automatic mode. Only when she picked up the lipstick did it hit her. It had been one of his little gifts, things he'd bought her 'just because' and given to her. Looking at her own face in the mirror, her eyes deep inside the dark circles, it all came back to her. Not just the cold, brutal breakup but everything.
They had met on the 347th floor, the city gardens, just like in the movies. She was sitting alone in one of the benches, taking up some sunlight and reading a old science fiction book, about a world with huge trees and forests, those were pieces of land, sometimes as big as a whole level, sometimes even bigger with nothing but trees, and some of those trees were hundreds of floors high. The garden floors were always thrice as big as a normal floor, but still the trees were small, the bigger ones barely going over two floors.
He had showed up, a nicely dressed young man, a bit younger than her, handsome and with a happy smile on his clean shaved face. He asked her if he could sit next to her, she just shrugged and moved a inch to the right. He sat there silently, looking at the never ending wasteland bellow for a while.
"So, what are you reading?"
She looked at him and back at her book without answering.
"I've read that book before. I like the idea but a whole planet covered in trees is impossible. There would be too much oxygen in the air and we'd all end up dead from excess oxygen."
"That's not true." - she didn't mean to answer but it came out her mouth automatically. He smiled before replying - "Oh so you can talk!"
She couldn't remember exactly what was said but two hours later, sitting in a small bar at floor 753, each with their own drink, he had been convinced that a world of trees could not only exist, but also support life.
The next week she didn't go to the garden, but when she did, he was there, siting in the same bench, reading some book. She got there and asked if she could sit there. He got a little to the left and she sat, asking "so what are you reading?" - She glimpsed at the book, old science fiction too, a story about a martian invasion of earth.
"I've read that book before. It could never happen because mars has no life and never did. And even if it did have life, their biology would be so different that there's no way the flu could kill them."
"That's not true" - he said. She smiled before saying her next line "Ah so you can talk!".
After that there had been 15 months of happiness, traveling the entire city, up and down. He had taken her to the top floor and they had made love against the wind turbines. She had shown him the underground floors and they made love, with the huge furnaces as the only witness. They shared his apartment on the 486th floor for a full year and everything was wonderful.
The he was offered his dream job on a different city. She couldn't ask him not to go, and she couldn't go with him either, not until she finished her last year. In 5 more months she would have a post-graduation and would be able of finding a job in his city.
They made plans and even had schematics of how their apartment would be like. They talked everyday online, and she even went to meet him, leaving her city for the first time. She knew, as every inhabitant knows, that the city wasn't the only city in the world. She had seen the other cities, from the gardens, if you looked anywhere but South, you'd see the other huge towers, going up into the sky.
And only two days had passed since she arrived at South City 1 in the express train from West City 3, where he has now living. All this went by her in a flash, she dropped the lipstick on the floor and started crying again. She had a presentation for her thesis that day, but instead of going she cried.
The next day she was weak, from lack of food and lack of sleep and lack of water. She forced herself to eat something and went to the top floor, a bottle of Recycled Whiskey in one hand, a small notebook in the other. She sat there, back against the wind turbine, sipping from the bottle and writing. When the bottle finished she threw it into the blades and watched it going into little pieces. She wrote down a couple more lines before resting the notebook on the floor, taking a deep breath and jumping into the giant steel blades.
Her body was turned into shreds and spread into the wastelands, where it would be united with land and sand. The notebook was found a week later, by a maintenance guy. The first page read "A Guide To Relationships", the second began with "Someday you were born," and the last read "and then you die."