“Don’t let them take the plates away.” We’d finished eating and were chatting about some kind of wonderful, but she didn’t want the table naked. Slivers of ribs and bits of ceviche lay waste as a reminder of the time we’d spent together, on what was truly the first day of spring. It was our first meeting, and I hoped it wouldn’t be the last.
I had met her on a whim. She had eyes that glistened and lips that spoke of conviction. I know, it’s cheesy, but facts are facts. Reality doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and she and I didn’t invent our existence—this was a calculated effort by time and space. The confluence of forces that brought us here was not magical but practical. Everything mattered.
Walking her home, the chill of the winter wind persisted through the rays of the sun. In the sheets of air that cut through our beings, I didn’t care for our differences—none of that mattered when there was a bigger picture at stake.
But between the wining and dining, between the sheets and kisses, we were left wondering—there was always a lingering distance that made us feel apart. The tendency to fall is easy, but the glue that sticks never comes at a discount.
“We need to talk” is the conversation that nobody loves to have but everyone needs to hear. Why it wouldn’t work didn’t matter, just that it didn’t. The precipice of hope at which we were at was shattered by a snowstorm unbeknownst to us, crippling us even before we began. The signs were there, but you simply couldn’t comply because there was too much on the line.
This is what you hope for, but it is never what you get. Our lives are discrete, incidental, nominally obscure. Perfection never lets because rain always falls.