“This cold is breaking us apart” the girl whispered just loud enough to see her words form into a cloud and float slowly across that frozen lake to ruffle the boy’s two month old haircut.
Posts tagged that day.
“then what did he say?” they asked the girl.
“i don’t know, he never came back”
The girl rested her forehead on the cool plexiglass of the airplane’s window. Her delicate breath turning the circle of fog into a heartbeat, growing and shrinking with each sigh. She had come west to fill the emptiness in her with quiet mountains and the boy’s promises, but the mountains ended up being a desert and the boy a liar, and so here she was again, looking out a window at the world and wondering where she would fit in.
A long retired nile file, small felt bunny, 16 movie tickets and a regrettable tatto, the girl had always saved things from their time together. She told the boy she liked physical manifestions of their past happiness, they reminded her it was real. Now, on that first cold night in December the girl smiled, thinking how she had replaced a trunk full of him with one little bus ticket away.
For the first time ever, the girl didn’t (or wouldn’t?) recognize the boy. The forehead she had kissed, the cowlick he was always trying to hide, his smoke-blurred eyes and quiet stare had become uncomfortably foreign in the back of a rain-streaked cab. He had been a brief crack of light under the door of an otherwise dark existence, disintegrating her sadness into neat happy piles. But on that day and in that cab she looked at the boy’s face and felt the sad pieces of her congealing again, and she knew finally, predicability the light was gone and soon he would be as well.
They told her it would take some getting used to, that she would learn to love the things that hurt her, but the truth was she already loved the thing that hurt her and he wasn’t picking up the phone.
“What do you remember most about her?” they asked him.
“I remember almost everything,” he sighed, “What I can’t seem to forget is she had café au lait eyes”
She told him she’d do it. Wrote it on mirrors and left crumbled notes in his glove compartment. The boy would laugh his smug laugh almost crying, “no, no, you can’t, you won’t” and she whisper softer, always softer, “i will, i will, i will…”
She was always doing things like that. Her coy smile telegraphing the inevitable acceleration of her size sixes. The boy had chased her up stairs and down, across streets and through busy restaurants just to catch her smiling and breathing heavy. He would lie saying, one day he might decide to stop chasing her. The truth is he never did and on that day, bounding up the escalator he prayed she’d be there again (she wouldn’t) but he hoped, he hoped…
It was a funny thing to get to the boy, but if you have to know he couldn’t stand it. Every morning. Every single morning the girl would build a fort in their bed and stand her ground. You see, she ravished in her sleep and drank the morning clean with relish. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her sleeping (we all have our vices,” he would say) it’s just he hated how comfortable she was without him.
walking across the room i stopped short when i smelled the woman i knew, or thought i knew. it’s funny how i could forget almost everything about her. i could drink away her laugh, wash away her touch but i could not train myself to forget the way she smelled.
“Did you hear me say I was sorry?” the girl asked.
“I didn’t,” the boy spat
“Would you have cared if you did?”
“I wouldn’t”
On hot days the boy and girl would lay on the floor watching the lights go out one by one. Now with anxious sweat making his skin itch the boy watched the lights alone, wondering with every inevitable extinction if it was hers
She tried to spit them out, but words keep falling apart in her mouth like spent gum.
It was on nights like this: a crowded resturant, an unfamiliar boy, that the girl missed that old rubberband. But he had broken his promise and she had torn up that note and now, all that was left to do was rub down the beads of her necklace and forget it ever happened.
HIGHLIGHTED LIFE
THE PERSONAL TUMBLELOG OF JAMES NORD:
the author of this blog is:
accidental photographer
amateur cyclist
sartorial stickler
hustle disciple
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