It didn’t hurt like it should.

Breathing was easy. There was no choking, suffocating, sudden inability to fill her lungs with oxygen. No icy, vice like grip on her heart; it carried on beating, steadily. Her stomach did not lurch, her mouth did not go dry and no uninvited tears filled her eyes or slowly slid down her cheeks.

Almost bored, she watched silvery specks of dust floating in the sun warmed afternoon air and felt only an eagerness for him to go. To utter whatever words he had left and leave. There was no desperation to prolong the moment, no fumbling through a mind in turmoil for reasons for him to stay, no inclination to plead that things could have, should have, could still be different.

He stood there in frayed, faded jeans he had owned for too long, talking, speaking, spilling unheard meaningless words into the shafts of dust speckled sunlight. He owned no explanations worth listening to. He wasted words. Empty clichés, egocentric opinions, effortless and unrelated asides – they were all there – dreary, deluded, self-indulgent. She had no interest in any of it.

It didn’t hurt. She was not heart broken.

She looked at the man in front of her, still talking yet saying nothing. That familiar face that she didn’t recognise. Overused, pathetic phrases foamed and bubbled between his lips. He wasn’t talking to her. He was just talking. Speaking. Loudly filling a silence that didn’t need to be filled in an attempt to justify his choices, to validate his decisions to himself. Filling the silence so that the knowledge that he was wrong could never settle and its presence become a truth.

The sun hit a glass vase on the mantelpiece and fragments of rainbow scattered across the pale yellow wall. Beautiful and broken into tiny, wonderful pieces. A magical backdrop to an entirely unremarkable event. The end of something less than extraordinary.

She felt stirrings of impatience. Embarrassment for him; that he felt important enough to need to offer details, comfort, unconvincing excuses. His clumsy monologue continued in circles, he said nothing new, nothing interesting, nothing with substance.

She wondered why he continued. He had said it all, in the very first sentence: ‘I didn’t fight for you because I didn’t think I could get you back’. And in that moment she had known that he had never been good enough for her and that he would never have been enough for her.

The shafts of sunlight moved across the worn wooden floor, she reflected on the wasted years now tainted with mediocrity. He carried on talking.