A Chance to Start Again

I wait under the cherry blossom trees on Fifth Avenue. A breeze shuffles through my coat, brushing against my bones and ruffling petals free overhead. They spiral around me, pink flushing the air until the wind drops and they drift to the ground. 

To be trodden on by the soulless soles of New Yorkers.

He is late. My fingers tap out a salsa on my worn denims, the bitten edges of my nails angry and red. A childhood habit, brought on again in times of stress. I resist the urge to nibble a hangnail. I must appear confident. 

I feel anything but. 

Time ticks past on my battered wristwatch, the seconds tumbling over one another. Still he is not here. The pained sigh that trips out of my mouth is so loud that the nearby birds pecking in the browned grass take to the air, twittering in annoyance. My head sinks into my hands, coming to rest on my bent knees. 

In my stomach, insides twist together. In my throat, bile burns. I urge myself to calm down. Once he’s here, it’ll all be ok. Even to myself, I don’t sound convincing. 

Red converses appear in my eyeline, canvas scorched and stretched across feet that are too wide for the shoes that they inhabit. Slowly, inch by inch, I look up. 

I drink him in. The year that has passed hasn’t

 left a single mark upon him, glancing off of his tanned chiselled cheekbones. Blonde hair shot through with platinum gently flops above his left eyebrow, cobalt eyes still piercing, still searching for that hidden joke in every sentence. 

I fall in love all over again. 

He sits at the other end of the bench, hands clasped safely between his knees. We both know this is so that I can’t reach for them. Can’t entwine our fingers, brush palms, get what I want with drippings of sweet talk and a caressed knuckle. 

He knows me too well. 

“So,” he says, drawing out the word until it hangs between us, solidly taking up space on the wooden slats of the bench. 

I want to bat away the word, and with it all of our history. But there is a steel in his eyes that stops me from sliding closer. 

“Thank you for coming,” I say, formally, demurely, as innocently as possible. 

The baritone chuckle that trickles out of him is devoid of humour. “You’re the one that flew more than three thousand miles,” he replies. “I only strolled around the corner.” 

Something inside him lights up, switches on at this comment. 

“Which makes me think,” he says. “How did you know where I live?” 

Unabashed, the truth spills out of me, admitting the pleading calls to his sister, his mother, any friend of his that would listen. Every word that falls out of me lifts the pressure off of my chest slightly more, lets a little more oxygen leak into my lungs. 

Every word that falls out of me deepens the furrow in his brow, hardens his eyes and shifts him further away from me. I claw the final few words back, swallowing how I had found his girlfriend’s social media profile, seen her ‘moving in with the boyfriend’ posts, checked the location tags. 

I’d researched the parks of the surrounding area, checked out the reviews on Google. When I had read about the cherry blossom, it only seemed right that we met here. 

“How have you been?” He asks gently. 

“Lonely,” I say softly. His grimace doesn’t deter me. I try again. “I miss you.” 

Shoulders brace, angled away from me. 

“You shouldn’t have come,” he says.

Ignoring him, I lift a hand and carefully pluck a blossom out of the air. Tuck the fragile petals behind my ear, turn to him with the impudent grin of seasons past. “Do you remember?” I ask. 

He mirrors my actions, reaching for a floating flower and balancing it cock-eyed on top of his ear. Turns, meets my eyes with a renewed twinkle. 

Together, we fall back in time. To that last spring, when university exams had finished and freedom was about to reign for one last summer. Before the real world dragged us apart, and we were still heady with that overwhelmingly potent love that only the young feel. Back to the cherry blossom tree where we’d declared our feelings for the first time, gleefully saying the words over and over again until they’d almost lost meaning. Exhilarated, because we had done it. We had found the one so early in life, and now we could relax. 

And now - 

Now we sit, back in the present, my heart still full of yearning. 

“As I said in my email,” I begin. “I want to apologise for everything that happened between us.” 

His eyebrow twitches, but mouth remains sealed shut. 

“At the time, I don’t think I realised the stress that you were under, that I was under. I was too wrapped up in us to see the bigger picture, and I think that perhaps I was unfair to you.” 

Eyebrows shoot up and disappear into blonde hair. 

“Unfair,” he repeats, velvet voice carefully controlled. “Unfair.” He says again. 

I sit and wait patiently for the apology to sink in properly, for the barriers to fall between us and the inevitable sweeping hug that will follow. 

I wait a long time, as he wrestles with an inner tempest, head bowed and hands clenched. 

Then: fingers unclamp, face lifts, eyes soften. 

“Thank you for your apology,” he says. “I appreciate you taking the time to make the journey.” 

But the passionate embrace does not come. So I reach eagerly for his hand, thinking that perhaps he is just too nervous, too shy after all this time to make the first move. Lightly caress the back of his knuckles, all the while babbling about how his new girlfriend doesn’t matter, how I don’t blame him, how it will be so easy to start again, either back home or here - 

He recoils in horror, confusion and disgust rewriting his handsome features. 

“Mandy will be alright eventually,” I say. “But she must have known that it wasn’t going to be a serious thing.” 

He shakes his head in disbelief. “How do you know my girlfriend’s name?” He says. “Why would you think that I’m going to break up with her?” A pause. “Are you really so deranged that you thought you could come here, to my new home, and we would just get back together?” He spits every word at me, laced with bitterness and contempt. 

Now I am shaking. My anger boils up and bubbles over, how dare he be so callous, so awful with my heart. After I came all this way, made such an effort to find him when he was too scared to look for me. 

I say this to him, my voice shaking from the effort it takes not to shout. 

“Of course I was too scared to look for you,” he says. “I took a restraining order out against you. I moved to America to get away from you.”

Reassure him, I think. Let him know that this time won’t be like the last time. He’s afraid of the unknown. I let my fingers slowly drift out to stroke his cheek, like I used to do when he was upset and needed to be calmed down. 

He flinches before my fingertips reach his face. 

“Look,” he says heavily. “I only came today to ask you in person to leave my family alone. To stop calling everyone I know. And to leave me alone forever.” 

I wonder if it would help if I cried. 

“Don’t even think about tearing up,” he says. If only he knew how well he can read my mind, if only he could see how perfect we are together. 

He repeats himself. “Thank you for your apology.” Cuts me off as I begin to protest and list all the reasons why we should get back together immediately. 

“If you contact me or my family,” he says. “I will speak to the police again. And this time I will tell them everything.” 

He lifts up the hem of his t-shirt, lets me glimpse the puckered white scar that stands out against his browned stomach. My gut twists at the memory, guilt adding to the curious concoction of emotions that I am feeling right now. The cloth falls back down, but I can still see the peculiar white end of the scar, can still see the chipped Ikea plate that did the damage.  

The cherry blossom has sat on his ear this entire time, comically bouncing as he spoke. Now he pinches it with two long fingers, and carefully, without touching my face, tucks it behind my free ear. 

Then he stands. Steps on dying blossoms and the scattered pieces of my heart. And walks away from me forever.