When I see you again

1970

The moonlight hits my eyes softly, just enough to illuminate our presence. Our dancing shadows are casting shapes beside the water, the whole summer’s eve spent with our embracing reflections.

Her siren brown eyes are glowing under the moonlight, her tight brunette curls all watered down with sea salt. My scrawny arms are around her, my blue eyes looking through her smile, a smile full of elation, warmth, safety. As our bodies collide, brushing against each other, nothing matters anymore. No warm night, no humid water, no glowing moon. Just us.

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1970

He smells like pine cologne and cigarettes. His blue eyes look at me sheepishly, his gaze affixed on mine and mine on his, a greatly executed symphony.

In the evening breeze, the waves are swinging back and forth, hugging our legs while we embrace under the moonlight. His long blonde hair is intertwined between my fingers, whilst I stare at his angelic face. I never once feel like a stranger or question his intentions. We just met, but I feel like we met a lifetime ago.

He turns to me in anxious apprehension, his blue ocean eyes gazing at me, as he turns to ask the question we both fear. No words come out of his mouth. And so I speak.

“Don’t forget me okay?”

I turn to him as I say it, the obvious anticipation written all over my face. He nods his head left and right, to signal how incredulous this sounds. He looks at me with warmth as he lets it out.

“Never.”

While we are surrounded by the smell of jasmine, salt and sea, he is the most expensive odour in the air. And at that moment, the world pauses for a bit.

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1976

I am staring at the cement gray wall, its darkness slightly evaporated into the sunrays across the bed. Darkness has taken over most of the rooms, and dust particles have started forming on the outer corners of the wall.

They’ll bring in an attorney today, supposed to help me with my case. In the span of four whole years, I don’t want to hope for anything.

“What's for dinner bunkey?”

Sam interrupts my thoughts, entering the room in an unjustifiably triumphant look. Unlike myself, he doesn’t mind his time in the cell.

Personally, I don’t think time is the best medicine. I think that time kills you slowly, meticulously. It ensures that you only remember half of it, half of what is real and half of what is fabricated history.

He sees me while I see her, my gaze affixed on the only polaroid I have from the night.

“Man, you gotta let it go. And you gotta eat too.”

I hear him like a distant echo, but I don’t reply. It’s not easy to let it go. As I stare at her, her glorious smile and shining eyes, I remember that all our memories have formed around this picture. They have resided in between tight spaces, stuck in the embrace we held too long yet too little.

I close my eyes and I am transported to Hawaii again.

Here I am, middle of the day, drowning my worries in cigarettes and pints.

She approaches me poisely, not shyly.

‘Is this taken?’

She points to the extra sunbed tucked just beside mine, as if asking for permission to enter my mind and space.

Her curls are watered down by the pool, yet her look remains stunning.

She is wearing a one-piece suit, red in colour.

I nod affirmatively, my eyes becoming smaller as the wrinkles form on my smiley face.

We stay and talk until the curls dry out, the sun setting right before our eyes. Our talk quickly escalates.

Suddenly, we are already at the coast, drinking wine and dancing.

She tells me how she escaped an abusive relationship, decided to be a solo traveller. She reveals the obstacles she faced, tells me how life is about discovery, travel, improvement. Her lifelong dream is to become a singer and move to LA. “I’m sure you will make it”, I tell her with high hopes.

When it’s time to speak, I unfold my trauma, the pressure to become self-reliant as a product of a failed marriage, the fear that I will not progress much career wise, revealing that my time with her is the only break I get from my part-time waiter job in the resort.

We nod and embrace each other. We are just two strangers that became overnight lovers, our wounds stitched together like a body of one.

In the midst of a warm July, we are two strangers. On the evening of July 19, we are two intertwined souls.

You ask me not to forget you. But how could I, my lovely?

What about you? Are you alive? Are you well?

Why didn’t you write to me???

You met me as a hopeless waiter, now I am even worse than that. An offender, a criminal, a captured man.

I snap back into the present, observing the polaroid with intense thought.

I see a doomed no-hoper holding a captivating woman, a ray of light brought into a brunette presence. Her eyes are insistent, staring at me as if stealing my entire existence from the now, trying to bring me back again to her, to that night.

I feel myself jumping in and out, allured by her siren eyes, lost in an amplitude between Sam’s insistent callouts and her calming presence.

Despite my no longer scrawny physique or weak character, I realize that I am no longer the master of my own reality. Memory is.

In between the leaps of time covering July 1970 and November 1976, I feel like a weak boy again, defeated by my own thoughts and archives.

In that moment, only one thing remains truthful.

I don’t regret not being able to forget you. I regret not becoming better for you.

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1976

The veil feels heavy on my neatly braided hair. I look at the woman in the mirror and a bride is staring at me. She is dressed in an opaque white wedding dress, her hair neatly put into a braid and tucked behind her ear. At first glance, she looks happy. At second glance, she is smiling through fear.

“Well? What do you think?”

The screeching voice of the clerk catches me off guard. She stands still, awaiting a reply that is difficult to let out.

She looks at me again, this time concerned.

“Are you well, Miss?

I stare in the mirror, eye to eye with the bride again. As I stand there, puffy sleeves, white opaque dress, hair put in place, I realize my complexion has absorbed the colour of the dress, slowly becoming as pale as snow. I don’t speak, don’t bother to prepare an excited response, or a joyful expression. After all, if I did, I would be lying.

In the final glance, I realize what the bride and I share in common. She is a hopeless romantic, defeatedly back with her abusive ex, returning to him like a surrender, stuck on a loop of a faded memory. She was also a failed actress, lost, restless, unable to land a role. So she went and got her degree. Law. In a way she is a combination of various meanings, all combined into a young girl at heart.

She tried, you know. She tried to fulfill her dream, to become all that she wished for in the summer of 1970. But then life happened, and reality hit her like a brick. She slowly learned to sit with her decisions silently.

Today is the meeting. They assigned me a robbery, a case of 4 years involving a bank. There is considerable difficulty, as the verdict has been wavering on the accused’s guilt ever since. Nervous but collected, I take off the wedding dress, thank the insistent clerk and change back into my attorney suit.

—-----------------------------------------------------

1976

I arrive at the scene. In front of me stand filthy old peas in a sauce that I cannot define. Behind me lay chairs and tables and crowds that either await their loved ones or their professional, corporate saviours.

I for one, don’t have a clue what to look out for. The prison called me immediately, and there was apparently no need to get a file beforehand. As per their words, my guy is tall, slim, but not too slim, blue eyed and according to the Prison Officer, ‘somewhat handsome’. I always feel for indigent prisoners. They may be guilty, and they may not be. But one thing is for sure; everyone deserves legal representation.

The Prison Guard finally comes in, accompanying my guy. “You have 20 minutes”, he tells me sternly. I see them as they approach the sea of prisoners, the waves of accusations. As they get closer and closer, I can see a face forming on the thief.

A slim physique, considerable tall stance.

Closer.

I can see his eyes. Blue, blue as the sea.

I know those eyes.

Closer they get.

He locks eyes with me.

Now my heart is racing. I am panicking.

His eyes become bigger, bigger than the whole ocean all together.

Nearly face to face, eye to eye now.

His shock is imminent, as is mine.

Our eyes finally meet.

Now my eyes are wide, only stuck on a ghost of the past.

I see you. I see you!

Is it really you?

Why are you my client? Why are you here? Why are you accused?

Why, why, why ?

I try to control my emotion, try to put my heart back into my chest but it is beating so fast I think it will fall out.

I am a professional, but now I am just the girl by the pool. I am smart, but now I am simply the woman you held for a warm summer night.

Finally, you are facing me, your feelings slowly mirroring mine. Our meeting shares equal amounts of revelation, a shared handful of nostalgia and a whole lot of chemical reaction. We don’t know who should speak first or what to say. I, for one, want to say how I missed you, how I waited my whole life for you, how I want to take you out of this misery that you so clearly are innocent in. Yet despite all my elaborate thoughts and overplayed schemes in my head, I simply let out four words.

“Did you do it?”