I felt it first, a stirring, one of those intuitive feelings that starts in the pit of your being and slowly spreads through your body like a ripple stretching out across a pond.
Something is happening.
My chin lifted slightly and the sound of the voices around me seemed to fade. I turned my face over my right shoulder, something invisible was pulling me there. And that’s when I saw him.
I was startled. It had been a long time.
His eyes were taking me in, while the woman he was standing with tinkered with something on the store shelf. It took a second for him to realize that I was responding to the silent call and was looking back at him. But, at the instant when our eyes would have met, he quickly turned his face back to the object on the shelf, pretending not to see me. Simultaneously, a response was welling up in me, my mouth opened to say something that my heart hadn’t had the chance to translate into words but froze when he looked away.
Maybe he was scared, maybe he was conflicted, maybe he was angry. I didn’t know what he was because I didn’t get to look into his eyes, the place where truth screams when all else is silent. His heart was always dwelling there, clearly visible, no matter the stoic look that otherwise occupied his features. I used to pretend not to see the love shining back at me when I looked at him—it was too complicated and I wasn’t ready to take that chance again. But now, all I wanted was a peek into those eyes to see how they reflected me and if there was any chance of recovering even a tiny piece of the relationship that we’d once had.
My dear friend, I have missed you, I am sorry.
The words were burning in my throat, roaring up from the pit of my being, almost throwing me towards him with their force. But I stood rooted in place. He didn’t deserve the pain I caused him, he didn’t deserve this moment or the confrontation that I wanted to have. I snapped my mouth closed but understood that he could hear the words through the gaze that I briefly cast in his direction and feel the emotion moving toward him that not even my stilled-feet could hold back.
I sharply whipped my head back around to the teapot I had been examining on the shelf. I didn’t know what to feel; happy that he was so close or sad because it didn’t seem to matter. I closed my eyes against the conflict and my hands tightened into helpless fists at my sides. Memories flashed before me; the first time I rounded the corner and saw him standing there, coffee in hand…the tipsy birthday kiss at the red-light on Hawthorn and Randolph…sitting in the sand on a beach at midnight feeling like we were the only two in the universe that understood each other. But none of that mattered anymore, I realized, as haunting lyrics whispered in my head, “Memory is not love and it’s not life…”
I suddenly became aware that the man I was shopping with was talking to me and I opened my eyes, only to stare at him unseeingly. He didn’t seem to notice my conflict or that as he continued to speak, his voice became muffled against the loud pull of the other man standing three, totally, irrelevant feet behind us. I chanced a glance behind me to see that the woman also seemed unaware of the past that had unexpectedly joined us as she continued to move about normally.
It seemed like fate that we had both wound up in the same place at the same time. As far as I knew, he was still traveling and I had since moved halfway across the country but here we were, standing in this little obscure gift shop on East Boulevard together—but not.The tortured ghost of decisions-past roared to life inside me. He was the road not taken in my life—the ‘what if’? And for the ga-zillionth time, I sadly wondered why he waited until I was wrapped in another’s arms to tell me that he finally chose me and that he was coming home to stay.
A year ago, I told him, “You break my heart”
“Likewise", he said
And he abruptly vanished from my life.
My eyes burned with tears as his scent caught up with me and my heart felt heavy with the realization that we had both made the decision, right at that moment, in that shop, to hold tight to the destiny that had already been handed down by the sad, beautiful, mysterious and ever-confusing universe.
I was disorientated and heartbroken as we all four moved about the small room, circling around the shelves, each other, and a past that in that moment, was still alive, still longing and still loving.
June 2014
*Lyrics from, "Bare" by The Cure