One Day, Maybe

Rain splashes up into the air around my boots as I make my way down the puddle-filled sidewalk. The pink neon lights of the bars in my street reflect off the aftermath of last hour’s downpour and into the night sky. I can see the moon, high up and proud in the darkness. I roughly recall that tonight is exactly a half moon—half-full or half-gone, I can’t quite remember. My breath forms misty clouds in the air as I exhale, a taste of winter in the middle of November. 

I slow down as my destination comes into view. I can’t believe I haven’t been here since graduating even though I still live just as close as I did when attending classes and lectures here. I suppose it’s a time management thing. Being a full adult with all the freedom and increased budget comes at the price of added responsibilities and a decline of spare moments. 

Or maybe I’ve been trying to avoid being hit by a flood of memories. 

My steps echo across the empty campus. During the day it’s full of students, hustling from class to class and laughing and each other’s jokes, buzzing with energy and dreams. By this time of the evening it’s usually quiet, almost deserted. Classes have ended and only a handful of students are left, hurrying home or to a party or getting in a few more hours of studying before an important exam. 

I almost don’t even register it at first, the way I begin recalling our moments as I walk, my brain filling in the blanks almost automatically. Our first kiss in the corner next to the library. Dancing through the summer rain, sloppy kissing and laughing until our stomachs hurt. The way you looked at me when you told me, voice shaky, that it felt like what we had was something special, like we truly understood each other. Walking across campus holding hands, and how it felt so right to be there. The time when you told me that you couldn’t tell me the words I so desperately wanted to hear, but that one day you could, and one day you would. 

I wonder how something can feel like yesterday and a lifetime ago all in the same heartbeat. 

The student bar finally comes into sight and I’m hit with the familiar sound of laughter and chairs screeching. The silhouettes of those sitting at outside tables are enveloped in a warm, orange glow from the heaters above their heads. I stop and stand in the darkness for a moment, taking it all in. So many memories, so many moments. Countless nights spent between beer-sticky countertops and half-finished pool games. Endless times searching for you across the crowded room. All the heart beats skipped when my eyes met yours. All the tears shed every time they landed on you kissing someone new, when the only one I could ever want was you. 

Eventually I walk in. Reluctantly or relentlessly, I’m no longer sure. Everything looks exactly like it used to look the last time we were all here—just over a year ago, celebrating our graduation and so blissfully unaware that it would be the last time we would all be here around the same table, drinking cheap beer from scratched plastic cups. There’s the tables with wooden benches on each side of the room. The burgundy barstools that have clearly seen better days. The retro posters on the wall, nostalgic for a time that no one in here knows well enough to be sure that it had actually existed. The bar that’s already overcrowded with students trying to combine dancing and singing along to the music with getting the bar tender’s attention to order a drink. 

So familiar, yet nothing feels the same. 

I catch myself scanning the room for your gaze. It’s the last remnant of a wishful thinking that I just can’t seem to shake. There’s some truth to the thing people say about habits, I suppose. 

Instead of on you, my eyes settle on our group of friends, and I cross the room to sit down. I take in the familiar faces, assess the circle of people huddled over their cups of beer on the wooden table. Everyone’s here but you. I knew this before coming, of course. There is no way you would have flown back here from the other side of the world just to meet up with your university friend group and your long forgotten fling. But there’s something about hopeless hope, and the way it always remains. 

I casually drop your name, subtly ask if anyone’s heard how you’ve been. No one can tell the way that my heart starts aching, or how my fingertips start craving the feel of your skin, so my questions are answered without any suspicions. 

None of them has heard too much from you, though. How could they anyway? Your life is so different now, so far from what it used to be. But they’ve heard you’re doing well, and they tell it to me as if it could somehow fill the hole that’s still gaping in my chest. 

I look between my friends as they laugh. Half listen to their stories as I’m caught between remembering and trying to forget. Miranda makes a joke. Someone spills a beer and someone else shouts in shock. Miranda laughs, then gets up to get more drinks. The conversation picks back up, a constant mix of catch-ups, life updates, and remember when’s. 

I don’t know how to contribute to a casual chat when all I want to ask is, ‘Do you think when we love, we give a little piece of ourselves away? Forever to stay in the other person’s heart? Do you think that’s why it hurts so much when it doesn’t work? And where do you think love goes, where do you think it disappears to when it fades?’

It doesn’t seem like the right thing to say, so instead I join in on playing cards, laughing at each other’s senseless banter, and trying to chug beers as quickly as possible. Everything feels just like it used to, except for the fact that it’s not. Except for the fact that despite doing better, nights like this, when the mix of alcohol and nostalgia hits, punch me in the stomach like a freight train. Then all of the sudden I’m back to last fall, and summer, and spring, when all of our little interactions meant way too little yet way too much. When the air was filled with silent promises and all I could hear was the velvety soft whispered words as you pressed your lips against my ear. One day. The electricity that cursed through my body every time the intensity of your eyes met mine, and every time our bodies not so accidentally brushed on the dance floor of a crowded club. 

My eyes wander to the improvised dance floor in the middle of the room, people screaming and raising their hands as they sway through the night. Just for a moment, I let myself wish that any of them could be us. Just for a moment, I let myself wonder. 

Maybe it’s the possibility that I miss more than anything else. The emptiness of your promises, like a blank page that I could fill with rose colored daydreams and ink tinted stories as I pleased. The never ending roller coaster that would propel me to new peaks every time you so much as said my name, only to drop so suddenly and dramatically that I could barely breathe. Yet something inside of me twistedly enjoyed running out of air. 

The way the ground was from underneath my feet when you told us there was not much of a reason now to stay, and that you would leave. The weight of your once spoken promises in the months after. The intoxicating hope that maybe you had meant it when you said that, one day, we would be meant to be. 

But fate can be a cruel narrator.

“Anyone wanna play pool?” Miranda is back, a fresh jug of beer in one hand and a couple of pool cues in the other. She’s heard the ins and outs of our story, yet there’s only so much you can tell the friend that you have in common with the person who broke your heart.  

I get up, hoping that no one can tell that my legs are shaking. “Just like the old days,” she says with a smile. It’s nothing like the old days and we both know it, but I agree with her anyway. She holds out the pool cue and I grip onto it like it’s a lifeline. 

Your words still echo in my ears as I make my way through the crowd to the pool table, the steady beat of a drum my heart refuses to stop beating to. Even when you’re not here, even when I haven’t seen you in over a year. One day.