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I haven't blogged in months. Normally, when someone returns to blogging after a long absence, they open with a post explaining where they've been, and what wonderful or terrible life experiences have prevented them from blogging for so long, their new puppy who ate their laptop power cable, or the people who hacked their Facebook account and changed their profile picture to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, or the fact that their local muffin shop shut down their free wifi or blah blah blah. Then they'll promise to never leave their beloved readers again.
I'm not doing that. It's trite and clichéd, and really, I doubt any of you care. This isn't group therapy.  Instead, here's a short piece of flash fiction I wrote for a writing class a few months ago. It probabaly needs another redraft, but I read it at an open mic, and nobody openly told me it was shit, so I now assume it's amazing. Regular blogging will resume next monday, twice a week.

Footing The Bill

‘I just want you to know David, that it’s not you, it’s me’

She looked up from her drink and sighed, looking me in the eye for the first time in the whole half hour that we had been sat there.

‘No, I’m sorry, that’s not fair of me. We promised that we’d always be honest with each other, and I owe you that. It is you.’

I choked slightly on a mouthful of sandwich I struggled to swallow, and tried to come up with something, anything to say in reply.

‘I... but... What? Me? What?’

She sighed again, more heavily this time.

‘Don’t get me wrong darling, (Should I still call you darling? Probably not, I suppose); don’t get me wrong David, it’s not anything that you’ve done. It’s just that, well, I suppose you bore me.’

‘I... I bore you?’

‘Oh now! Don’t say it like that! You know that I’m not trying to be hurtful. Perhaps “bore” is too strong a word.  I just need someone a bit more... on my level. And it’s not like we didn’t have some fun times. Didn’t we have fun?’

She picked the last crisp from the side of her plate and nibbled at it daintily.

‘I’m... not on your level?’

‘I mean, we always had fun when we were out with my friends, didn’t we? Your friends can be a little... Is boorish the word I’m looking for? Certainly those rugby boys would class as boorish, with their drinking songs shouting and hollering.’

Our waiter gathered up our plates but, likely hearing our conversation, didn’t wait around to ask if we wanted dessert.

‘So, I’m boring and not on your level and you hate my friends as well?’

She sighed again. Her sighing at me seemed to sum up the entirety of our relationship really. ‘Oh now! Don’t go twisting things. I just think that we’d be better off as friends. You can see that, can’t you? Of course you can.’

She stood up. ‘Look, I have to go. I’m meeting Daniel, you remember Daniel from my office? I’m meeting him to go to the opening of an art exhibition in the library. It’s called “She Broke My Heart So I Ate Her Liver”. It sounds fascinating! Daniel is very into art!’

‘But... wait... Daniel?’

My mobile phone beeped; a text message. I ignored it

‘Look, I’ll call you, ok? We’ll have lunch again. A friendly lunch. As friends.’

And with that, she left. I sat in stunned silence, unsure what to do. It was several minutes before I realised that she’d left me to pay the entire bill.