Filling the Void
When Jude first noticed the growing crevice in his backyard it was hardly noticeable, barely a divot, really. One evening, after several rum-and-cokes and harsh words with his girlfriend Jenny, he had stumbled down the back steps and tripped over the newly-formed gash in his lawn. He had thought nothing of it.
In the following weeks it would come to rent more space in his head.
It was but a week after that first drunken tumble when he sprained his ankle in the same hole, a hole whose size had inexplicably expanded to accept his entire foot. Jude hid his injury and the existence of the mystery hole from his judgmental girlfriend given a sudden wave of seemingly delusional ideas that were beginning to inhabit what Jenny would call that empty waste of space between his temples.
For the next several weeks Jude obsessively monitored the mysterious, yet steady, expansion of this intriguing hole in his yard, a hole that just happened to appear the same day his suspicion of Jenny’s infidelity began to fester, and a hole to which Jenny–no surprise–was oblivious, or simply ignoring.
No longer capable of simply regarding it as a coincidental metaphor for the fissure that was tearing through their relationship, he inadvertently gave the hole a life of its own. It was impossible (he would argue–with himself) to deny the indisputable parallel between its expanding maw and the similarly ever-widening interstice insinuating itself between him and Jenny. In fact, on a daily basis, in an effort to acquire empirical evidence to support his stubborn belief that the enigmatic rift had to be some type of physical manifestation of their deteriorating relationship, he took precise measurements of its dimensions, painstakingly comparing its spatial growth to the capacious gap that was likewise expanding between them, a space that was growing, yet ironically losing mass, empty but for the ever-present pregnant and volatile silence occasioned now only infrequently by the terse comment or gesture.
Those terse comments inevitably gave way to suggestions of a break-up. Jude, if pushed, would have reluctantly admitted that he encouraged the idea of a split solely based on the hole’s persistent growth. Supported by the evidence he had so meticulously accumulated over the past weeks, the fact that he could now practically fit his jet-ski into the hole irrevocably lead him to the conclusion–nay, scientific deduction–that there simply was not enough space in the house to sufficiently separate them. So, after much deliberation, Jude informed Jenny that he would be gone in the morning, that he needed more space.
The next morning, as Jenny made breakfast for one, she reveled in Jude’s absence. She basked in the warm and comfortable space that seemed to have doubled, seemed to have, indeed, acquired a life of its own. Smiling, she gazed out the back window thinking, I might want to tamp that dirt down a bit more, maybe spread some grass seed… oh… and put away the shovel.
