Departure

A couple, one of them has to leave the country, for a period of time, for work or school, it could be three months, it could be six months, a year or two, or perhaps they did not know they will never meet again, or that things will never be the same when they see each other again, the clichéd scenario: of the guy already married, the girl is now pregnant, or the girl is engaged and the guy, has gotten someone else pregnant, and whatever. Yet, there are other things occupying the mind of the one who is going to leave than the imminent departure, perhaps it is to distract them from making epic statements or promises to each other, showing epic emotion, or any histrionic gesture, it could be mundane, because of the half-packed luggage, and it would very likely be banal, about the long hour flight with transit - to get mentally prepared for it, to be only half-asleep throughout the journey, if one could really fall asleep, next to another stranger, to sleep sitting, to see that service industry smile of the air stewardess, the badly choreographed safety evacuation demonstration or video, because in reality the flight is not twenty-second seconds, like in some bad film or drama where the scene and sound of a plane taking off cuts to the protagonist on the plane looks sadly out of the window, and then switches to the scene of another country, sometimes with caption at the bottom, stating the new location, because the flight is fucking twenty-eight hours excluding transit.
So the couple decides never to see each other off at the airport, he went to her place instead, an hour before she has to leave for the airport, when it was time he has to leave, she sees him off instead, at the corridor, they exchanged another few words, mostly broken sentences from him to trade for her smile, he kept reminding himself, nothing too sentimental shall be uttered, it is always harder to not say what you wanted say than to follow the impulse of saying out. She was leaning against the wall, he noticed a cockroach crawling, he pointed it to her, and she reacted like how people usually reacted to cockroaches, but without hysterical screams (he thought of the song lyrics, ‘watching roaches climb the wall, if you call your daddy he could stop it all.’ And her dad was actually inside the house, getting ready to go with her to the airport.) She told him, not her dad, kill it, kill it! He asked, with what? The sandal, the Birkenstock! One smack, the cockroach fell and wriggled on the floor, and she said, not dead yet, kill it! He ignored her second order to kill. He swept the cockroach towards the stairs and kicked it down the steps. He did not tell her that he was amused by how her decision, or intuition, perhaps out of fear, is similar to Adolf Hitler’s.