The Words

“Do you believe in love?” he asks you. You’re sitting in the doorway of the old French theater, watching the rain pour down beyond the crumbling awning and tired posts. You’re sitting in his lap with your cheek pressed against his chest, and the roughness of his wool jacket rubs against your face. 

“What kind of love?” you say, even though you know what he is talking about. 

“Eros,” he says, “Flowers and hearts and marriage and sex and saying ‘I love you’ with your eyes.”

You don’t say anything for a minute, watching the way the rain falls on the sidewalk and then lifts back up for a split second, as though it wants to go back into the sky. He lights a cigarette next to your ear, and after a moment you feel the soft tickle of the smoke against the back of your neck, see the pale gray mist curl out from behind you.

“Well?” he asks, and for a second you forget what he’s asking.

“Maybe,” you say, and you feel the bitter taste of the lie in the back of your throat. The wind blows rain against your face, and it’s colder than you thought. When you shiver, he pulls you closer to him and wraps the ends of his jacket around you. 

“I think love is overrated,” he says, as though you asked him, which you didn’t, because you knew what he would say. “Name one great love story that didn’t end in tragedy.”

The sun and the moon, you think, night and day, the sky and stars. You don’t say anything though, you just watch the rain slowly fade, until all that’s left is soft damp mist hovering ephemeral and fragile over the sidewalk. You think that the street looks like something out of an old photograph, like a woman with a parasol and old fashioned skirts with sad eyes will suddenly appear at the end of the road to stand, silent and lonely.

He finishes his cigarette and tosses the butt onto the ground. You watch its glow die against the wet stone, until it's just limp white paper. 

“Let’s go,” he says, and stands up so you are pushed forward by the sudden absence of him there to support you. He stands besides you, stretching like a cat, and you feel the urge to wrap your arms around his legs like a small child, to keep him from ever walking away. You don’t want this moment to end, because you know that there will never be one like it again. There will never be another day exactly like this one, the rain and the French theater and the cigarette smoke and the mist. 

He looks down at you and you wish that his eyes weren’t so many shades of brown, and the stubble on his cheeks didn’t make his jaw look so sculpted and firm. You think that he looks like a threadbare prince, standing over you in his wool coat and ripped pants, unshaven and cloudy eyed and perfect.

He pulls you to your feet and kisses you hard, until you feel your body go limp under his hands and your resolve crumble around your feet. He takes your hand and pulls you out onto the sidewalk, where the rain has left puddles that he playfully pretends to push you into. You laugh, but it sounds strained and anxious. He doesn’t notice, and of course you didn’t expect him to. 

At the bus stop you give him money for the ride and he kisses you in a way that makes people make little noises of displeasure as they step around your embrace. He doesn’t care about them though, that or he doesn’t even notice them, like most other things, your subconscious hisses in a spiteful little voice. 

“See you,” he says as he steps away and turns toward the bus, leaving his words open to interpretation. Does he really though, your subconscious whispers, does he see you at all? Of course he does, your heart says, you’re standing right in front of him. You know that’s not what I mean, your subconscious says, and smirks at your heart because it is small and desperate. 

“Orpheus,” you say suddenly, remembering, “Orpheus and Eurydice.” 

He turns back to you, at the mouth of the bus, confused.

“A love story that didn’t have a tragic ending,” you say, and you feel your heart beating in your chest like a trapped bird. “He went to hell to find his love and bring her back with him.”

His smile spread across his face slow and wide, and you feel it inside you, warm and dizzying. You watch as he steps onto the bus and waves at you through the window, and you wish that you could go with him, wherever he went.

It starts raining again as you turn away, a light mist that brushes your cheeks and hair, and you remember, suddenly, the ending to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus went to the underworld to find Eurydice, and take her back to the world of the living, because he couldn’t bear life without her. In order to bring her back with him he had to walk in front of her, and not look back until they reached the upper world again. 

He forgot, though, of course, and looked back to make sure that she was still there, and when he did she disappeared back to the underworld, where he could never find her again. He couldn’t bear the thought that she was not with him, and because of that he lost her forever. 

You stand on the sidewalk, the rain falling around you soft and gentle, and you think that it is devastatingly romantic; that he would lose an entire lifetime with her for one last look into her eyes. 

You wonder what that would be like, to lose it all in the time it takes to turn your head, the time it takes to fall in love.

********************

He is waiting outside the bar where you work; when you come outside for your break he is leaning against the brick wall smoking a cigarette, the smoke making a cloud around his face, blurring his features. 

The last time you saw him was almost a week ago, and he left you on the side of the road after saying that you were suffocating him. You cried for five days, and now here he is, unshaven and red eyed and sorry, and you don’t care what he said, so long as he is yours again. 

You stand next to him, not quite touching, waiting for him to speak first, listening to the muffled sounds of the bar through the wall behind you. Finally he drops the cigarette on the ground between his feet and turns to you, and you ache to be in his arms so fiercely it is a physical pain.

“Look,” he says, “I’m sorry about the other day, I shouldn’t have left you like that.” 

I don’t care, you think desperately, so long as you always come back, but you don’t say anything, waiting for him to finish.

“I just don’t like the feeling of being tied down,” he continues, “I’m not meant to hold still for long.” He’s looking at you like he expects something, and you nod as though you understand, even though his words are like tumbleweeds, brushing past you before you can catch them.

“I want you though,” he’s saying, earnest and not quite sober, “You’re not like anyone else I’ve ever been with, and I don’t want to lose you. I hope you understand.” He reaches and brushes my cheek, and he seems blurry around the edges, like a picture underwater, there but just out of reach. 

“Okay,” you hear yourself saying, and it doesn’t sound like you, “I’ll be better,” even though you don’t know what you’ve been doing wrong. 

He shakes his head and his hair falls across his eyes, and you wish that this conversation was over and your hands were tangled in his hair. 

“It’s not you,” he says, “It's me, and I want you to understand that I can’t be anyone other than myself. I just believe that life’s too short to hold onto anything.” Or anyone, your subconscious whispers, and your heart frantically says, he didn’t say that! Your subconscious doesn’t say anything, but smiles knowingly because she is cruel and jealous. 

And you nod, so he will see that you agree with him, that you understand, so he will take you in his arms and when he does you press your face against his chest so he can’t see your face and tell that you are lying. His heartbeat is rapid and strong against your cheek, and you shut your eyes and imagine the capillaries and veins and blood and muscle that keeps him alive, and you wonder if there’s anything else there. 

His arms are wrapped around you and his chin rests on the crown of your head, and you feel small but safe surrounded by him. You know that in a minute he’ll let go of you to light another cigarette, and soon your break will be over and life will pull you both apart for the time being, and then this moment will be over. 

Life’s too short to hold onto anything, he had said, but you are holding onto this moment, and you are holding onto him, because your heart is whispering that life is too short to let go of people like him and moments like these. 

*********************

When you try to explain your relationship to your friends, you find that they do not understand. You suppose that it’s because what you have with him isn’t like anything they have ever had, it isn’t movies and dinner and dates and anniversaries. Eventually, you stop talking about him, because what you have isn’t something easily explained. 

You think about it like a series of snapshots, a shoebox of dusty filmstrips in dim lighting and camera rolls that are full color but slightly blurry and stippled with cigarette smoke. 

Sitting on street corners listening to him talk about his dreams of falling skyscrapers, laying on the rug in his small, cramped apartment while you talk with him about politics and humanity and poetry, the same The Twilight Side record played in the background. Walking through downtown city streets with him in silence, him smoking endless cigarettes.

Hundreds of close up shots of his face, his dark eyes and hair and strong jawline, his smile that transforms everything around him. When you shut your eyes they are all there, these images, these moments, and they are stronger than the long spaces of time without him, the days that go by without a phone call, the time you saw him in a coffee shop with another girl.

It doesn’t matter, because when he is there you forget about everything else, and you are a different person, someone sexy and sophisticated and disillusioned, and it’s the kind of thing that you can’t explain unless you were there. 

And when your subconscious whispers in your ear in the middle of the night it is not enough, that what is missing is too much to be ignored, your heart climbs into bed and pulls the cover over her head, because she doesn’t want to see what’s waiting in the dark. 

*****************

You sit together on a bench by the road, watching the cars go by and not speaking, the silence so heavy you can feel it pressing against your chest, making every breath ache. He isn’t smoking for once, he’s holding your hand, and you try and memorize the rough feeling of his fingers, the gentle caress of his thumb against the inside of your palm, because you know this will probably be the last time. 

“Are you okay?” He asks, and you don’t look at him because you know that if you do you won’t be able to stop the tears. 

So far you haven’t cried once, not last night when he told you, not after he left, not now in these last few moments. He showed up at your apartment last night after three days without anything, and told you that one of his friends is moving to Portland, and offered to let him come stay with him for an undetermined amount of time. 

He was leaning casually against your counter-top, and drinking one of your beers when he told you, and you wondered how it could be so easy to break someone’s heart. “How long will you be gone?” you had asked, and he hadn’t noticed how much your voice was shaking.

“I don’t know,” he’d said, “I’m just going to see what happens once I’m there.”

“But what about me?” you had said, before you could stop yourself.

He had looked surprised, “You know who I am,” he’d said, “I’m just trying to follow the path in front of me, I can’t let anything hold me back.” Or anyone, my subconscious says, louder this time, and my heart puts her hands over her ears but hears it all anyway and knows that it’s true.

So now you’re sitting on this bench with him, waiting for his friend who is coming to take him away, away from you and out of your life. You can’t think of anything to say, just like last night. After he told you he was leaving you barely said anything at all, because the things you so desperately wanted to say he wouldn’t listen to. You didn’t say anything even when he made love to you for the last time, gentler than he ever had before, and you turned your face away so you didn’t have to see his wide brown eyes over you, because you knew you would break if you did. 

“Are you okay?” he asks again, and you remember where you are, sitting on a bench on the side of the road with a beautiful, terrible man, with the sky unfeelingly blue, because it doesn’t care about your pain. 

You nod, and he wraps his arms around you, and you want to pull away but of course you can’t because he has taken everything from you. 

“I’m sorry if you’re upset about this,” he says, “I really didn’t think that it would affect you like this.”

You want to scream in his face, to ask him what the hell he did think, but instead you just whisper, “I’m just going to miss you so much.”

“Me too,” he says, “I think you’re going to have a great life, an extraordinary one, maybe.” 

You wonder why he thinks that, when he is the great one, the one who will surely not settle for anything less than extraordinary. That’s right, your subconscious growls, and look, now he’s leaving. Your heart throws pillows at your subconscious but they fall to the ground halfway there and she laughs but it's more sad than cruel. 

He lifts your chin and kisses you long and hard, until he has stolen your breath from your chest, and then he pulls back and looks into your eyes. You trace his features with your finger, and you feel the words in the back of your throat, sweet and hopeful and hopeless.

Just say it, your heart pleads, because you know that you’ll regret it if you don’t, because he’s leaving and there’s nothing left to lose. Why, though, your subconscious asks, he doesn’t care, he doesn’t deserve it. Your heart glares at your subconscious and turns her back, because she can’t bear it. 

You hear the sound of a car’s engine, and know that his friend is here, that he is about to leave and you will be alone. He kisses you once more, soft and fleeting, then stands up. 

“Goodbye,” he says, “I’m so glad that I got to know you.” 

Wait, you think, wait, I need to tell you something, but you just sit there and watch him walk away. 

“Wait,” your heart says, and he looks out the window of the car, and he knows what you are going to say. 

“Extraordinary,” he mouths, and the car drives away. 

You sit on the bench after he goes, and think about that day in the rain at the French theater, when he held you in his arms. Do you believe in love? he had said, and you want to go back to that moment, to tell the truth, to look into his eyes and say, yes, yes I believe in love and I love you. 

You want to go back to that moment, and stand up, and walk out into the rain. You want to feel it fall on your face and stream into your hair, and you will wait for him to come join you, but if he doesn’t, you will be okay then too.