Picking Out the Tomatoes

I saw him out of the window this morning for the first time in months, standing by a bin, picking the tomatoes out of his supermarket sandwich and flicking them away. He was doing it one-handed, gripping the packet with his left while he fiddled at the filling with his right. Even from eighty feet above, I knew it was him and I knew exactly what he was doing.

"Matthew!" I shouted, but he had his iPod in. I tried again, louder than before and with a wave, but still he didn't hear - probably listening to Belle and Sebastian or Teenage Fanclub or something else I used to sneer at but secretly like.

I walked back in off the balcony and hurried across to the lift.

Inside, I pressed zero; the doors eased towards each other and clicked together. The capsule crept away, counting its way down from the fourteenth floor, away from the present and into my past.

I leant back against the mirrored wall and thought about Matthew, about what we'd experienced together and what had followed once we were apart. The doors opened at the thirteenth, eleventh, eighth and sixth floors; at every stop, a different memory snuck its way inside.

I thought about when I'd left him lying face down in tears on the sofa, walked out of his flat at three in the morning with no money for a taxi and made my way back home through the streets around Crouch End feeling...relieved.

I thought about the time when he'd asked me to marry him and I'd said yes, because that was what I'd been sure I would want to say, even though, when the moment arose, I'd known immediately that I really wanted to say no.

I thought about the time when he'd flown from London to Budapest to see me, on a whim; when I went down to the hotel bar and he was sitting there, waiting for me with no bags and no plan and two pints of cheap Hungarian lager, I knew that I loved him, that I loved him, that I really loved him, in all ways and with every possible emphasis.

I thought about making his ham sandwiches in the morning, cutting off the crusts and wrapping them in cling film.

The lift reached the bottom. I wandered out, through the lobby and into the street. He wasn't there. The tomatoes and the crusts and the sandwich packet were perched on top of the bin.

I still don't know if I was disappointed.