One Last Time

“I loved you, you know,” I said this quietly, I said it too quietly for her to hear. 

Or so I thought.

She smiled at me and my heart lurched in my chest. It went for a leap, but then she spoke and then I knew she wasn’t smiling because of what I had said. It was only a smile. Not quite random, but it may as well have been.

“Did you say something?”

I returned the smile with a paper mâché version of a smile, “thanks for this,” I said to her.

She shrugged awkwardly, “we always said that we would do it, didn’t we?”

“We did,” I agreed, and I left the obvious words unsaid. We’d said that we would go for a coffee once the dust on our break up had settled, but we never did. The timing of that coffee was supposed to be weeks, possibly months, but not years and certainly not decades. 

Decades.

Where had the time gone?

Somehow, it felt to me like it really had only been a matter of weeks since we’d been together. Nothing had changed, and yet everything had changed. But then, that was how it was with the break up. There was an intensity to our relationship that I had never before experienced. I felt things in a way I’d never knew was possible. A single shared look conveyed a depth of meaning. Being around each other was just so right, but there was more to it than that. A whole other dimension.

Then it had ended.

I hadn’t wanted it to end. That’s the way it happens sometimes. It takes two to make a relationship work, it only takes one to end it. 

I went to visit her one day and it had all changed before I even got there. Maybe she was exactly the same and it was whatever we had had between us that was gone. It felt like she’d turned the tap off, pulled up the shutters and gone away for the Winter. The structure was still there, but no one was in it and there was nothing going on. 

I was stunned. 

I didn’t know what to do.

Maybe I shouldn’t have done anything. Maybe it was a storm and I was supposed to ride it out. One of life’s hardest lessons is that sometimes the best thing and the only thing to be done is nothing. However much you want to do something, you have to still your hand and that’s all there is to be done. Doing nothing is an option that is all too easy to overlook, especially in the midst of all the noise and the chaos.

Instead, I tried to appeal to her. I tried to win her back. And when that didn’t work I told her how unfair she was being. She never said a word. She never engaged with me. I wanted to at least know why…

Why is a luxury that life seldom affords us, and when it does, we realise that we were asking the wrong question all along.

In the end, I suggested that maybe one day we could go for a coffee and have a chat. She’d agreed to this, but I was conscious of the maybe in my request. I’d made it easy for her to agree to something she would never have to commit to and this was a person who didn’t do commitment. Don’t get me wrong, my conclusion wasn’t based on her pulling the rug from under me, it was based on her entire life. She’d been dealt some crap cards along the way for sure, but she hadn’t done anything about those cards, she carried them with her wherever she went, and I wasn’t the only one to have been dealt a curve ball by her. 

I should have known.

I was a big boy by then and I’d been around the block a few times. But there’s always someone who can teach you another lesson or three. 

Sometimes it is said that it was good while it lasted, well this was some level way above good, and maybe that was why it was always going to end. The light burned brightly and then it went out abruptly. Only my light didn’t go out. That’s not how I am. That’s not who I am. Love doesn’t end. It isn’t a switch that you get to flick and that’s an end to it. 

Don’t get me wrong, I moved on. I had to. It’s what you do. Those memories we all have? They are imbued with love because we still feel it. We fill those memories with the vivid colours and the vibrancy that lights us up when we pull them out from the box and dust them off. 

And now, here she was, sitting opposite me in a coffee shop in town. We’d bumped into each other, literally bumped into each other, doing that silly pavement dance where both protagonists step in the same direction time and time again. I saw that as my opportunity to ask her for that coffee and only after she agreed did I wonder whether she thought I’d actively blocked her path in an attempt to influence her reply.

I hoped not, but what did I know? She didn’t think the way other people thought. That was what had been so wonderful in the heady days we’d spent together, and it was what had been equally shocking and frustrating when it had all imploded and turned into nothing in the blink of an eye.

“So how are you?” I asked over my giant mug of cappuccino, I didn’t buy coffee very often these days. I made one in the morning and then it was tea for me for the rest of the day.

She shrugged and inclined her head, “oh, you know.”

The thing was that I didn’t, and I don’t think I ever had.

“Yeah,” I said it for something to say, the alternative, a no of any persuasion, was not going to go down well and although I wasn’t all that into drinking my coffee, I wanted our interaction to last at least as long as the coffee did. 

“What are you up to these days?” I asked after a suitable pause that had allowed her to say something, anything to pick up some of the slack and not leave the responsibility to talk entirely with me.

There had been a time when we’d both just talked and talked. And listened of course. Everything had been free flowing and pretty bloody amazing really, and here we were now. It was awkward and worse than if we had been strangers waiting for different trains but with nowhere to sit other than opposite each other.

“Same thing,” she told me.

“You must have made partner now?” I said, trying my best for a lightness and breeziness to my words and whole demeanour, whilst struggling to retain my composure beneath the surface. Was it really that difficult to have a single conversation nigh on thirty years after a romance?

“Not quite,” she said, “I didn’t want the hassle that went with that.”

I smiled. She didn’t want that hassle and yet she courted a truckload of the unnecessary stuff. We may not have seen each other to talk to, but we had mutual acquaintances and without any digging I would sometimes hear her news, she had a habit of being newsworthy.

“Husband? Children?” I asked.

I was fairly certain I knew the answer, but as we were having that sort of conversation it would have been remiss for me not to enquire.

“Me? Marry?” she chuckled and looked at me as though I might be a pork pie short of a picnic.

I chuckled in response, and not only because I was at a loss as to what words to say, the chuckle pushed the onus back on her. Hopefully.

“And you know about Christian,” she said this as she took a sip of her latte. Gazing over her mug at me. I’d been on the receiving end of that inviting and mischievous gaze before and she still had it, even after all these years. There was still something there, only it was tainted with an incredible sadness. Seeing her was bringing back the conclusion of our relationship, not the hey days. The sadness was borne aloft on lost possibilities, of what could have been.

“How is he?” I asked. Chris was her son from a relationship before I ever came along.

“Dunno,” and again she shrugged.

“Oh?” I hadn’t meant to make it into a question, I’d been aiming for sympathy, but when it came down to it, I couldn’t bring myself to sympathise.

“He’s a big boy now, doesn’t need me,” she said in a failed attempt at nonchalance.

This was some of the person I had known. She was hurt and embittered and all too often she became defensive or went on the attack when neither of those things were going to help her or anyone else for that matter. I thought I had brought some balance into her life way back then, and maybe I did. For a while. In the aftermath of our broken relationship I sometimes thought that all the good I did made me a target. That she saved an all out attack just for me, one I would not expect and one I could not survive. 

“How about you?” she asked, “should you even be here, picking up other women?”

Her words were barbed. Some things do not change. I was shocked when she told me that she didn’t trust me. We were in the midst of a whirlwind and only had eyes for each other and she chose to throw that into the mix one evening. It came from nowhere and tripped me up. As far as she was concerned, it was a crime for me to talk to members of the other sex. Me specifically. I had this agenda you see and all of my chat was intended to lead to just one thing. It was ridiculous of course, but denying the ridiculous is nigh on impossible when you have been caught on the hop, besides, there was nothing I could say or do to convince her otherwise.

“I was going to wait for you to finish your coffee and leave before I picked anyone up,” I said with a wry smile on my face.

“I meant your wife,” she said bluntly.

“Oh, I doubt she’ll be bothered,” I said this glibly, but under that thin veneer of mine I was in turmoil.

“You haven’t changed then?” she countered.

“Nope,” I took a sip of my coffee, trying my best to steady my hand, and the rest of me for that matter, “I’m still a silver tongued cavalier. A legend in my own tea time. A merry widower with a grown up daughter who checks in on me twice a week to make sure I’m not overdoing it with all the women from the local Women’s Institute.”

“Oh,” she said, and that was all she had to say on the subject. I didn’t expect any different.

I drank some more of my coffee. It did feel off being here. With her. It shouldn’t. There was no reason for it to. None at all.

I put my coffee down.

“You and me…” I said

She mirrored my actions with her own coffee.

“There isn’t a you and me,” she said, with that edge she used from time to time.

“I know,” I said, regretting even engaging with her on this, now it sounded like I was conceding when there was absolutely nothing to concede, “I meant the you and me that happened back then.”

“Right…” she said, there was a warning in that single word, and I knew she did not want me to proceed.

“It was real for a time wasn’t it?” A statement from me, and a question for her at the same time.

She looked at me then, and she was about to say something, something that was likely designed to cut and hurt, then she thought better of it. Instead she let out a breath and her guard went down. The effect was transformative. In this one moment, we were both back where we had once dwelt, back to that time when things made a sense all of their own, but later would make no sense at all. 

She reached out a hand, offering it across the table. I took it just the way I had all those years ago. It was warm in a way that only a person you truly care about can warm you and it was a whole lot more than that, it was a connection to something special. I smiled and she nodded in return. A single tear tracked down her cheek.

She gave me something I didn’t know that I needed, and by that I mean both right there in the coffee shop and all those years back when she came along, hijacked my life, took me across the oceans, her oceans, and then abandoned me right back where I had started. I was never the same again, but that could only ever be a good thing, even if it hurt so badly at the time and left me with a wound that had never quite healed ever since.

We sat in a companionable oasis of silence whilst the world turned around us and we finished our coffees, and then she left.

She said goodbye and asked if I was leaving, I shook my head and couldn’t resist, “The afternoon is still young, I might chance my arm, pick up a lady or two…”

She’d looked at me uncertainly and for a moment I saw a vulnerability in her that I think she had only ever revealed to me, my comment had landed and she was hurt, but then the shutters came down, she was lost to me once again, and I watched her go.

I watched her go and she made a kind of sense to me now. She had been herself with me, but she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t risk herself out there in the big wide world. I’d disarmed her and made her vulnerable and one day she woke up to what was happening and called a halt to it. She locked herself and her heart away for fear of losing them, and instead she lost me. 

That was the choice that she made all those years ago.

I think I’d always known it, but never had the words for what had happened. It was so…

Unnecessary.

She was so much more than what she had shared with the world.

I got up from my chair and peered out at the dark sky. The clouds had swarmed in as soon as she had left and there was no threat of rain in them, it was an absolute promise, and the promise was only for me.

As I stepped out from the coffee shop there was a single crack of thunder, a flash in the sky and the heavens opened. I trotted away from the audience in the coffee shop window and once I was on my own I raised my arms and lifted my face to the sky. These were my tears, but I didn’t feel sad anymore. Something had been released in me just now and I felt this inexplicable happiness. I may have danced then. I may have danced behind that veil of rain and when I got home the dog bore witness to more of my dancing tomfoolery.

“There’s life in the old dog yet,” I told my mutt as she sat watching me.

And there was. I’d already lived a fair old life and I’d put myself out there. I’d made myself vulnerable, and even when it hurt, I may have retreated to lick my wounds, but I came back and I gave it another go. 

Now I was giving myself permission. Permission to keep going. To keep living and dance this dance that we call life.