I had been sitting on this lavishly upholstered furniture for some time now, waiting for him to turn up. It was not entirely a productive course of action to just watch every person traipse in and out of the café, expecting for an adventure to happen any time soon whilst tapping a lazy finger on the smooth coffee cup, suddenly stricken with nostalgia, because, after all, nothing favorable could ever come out of such sentimentality.
One swift look at my watch and I figured how it was already late. He had not yet turned up for our afternoon rendezvous, but I was surprisingly unfazed about it.
A rupture of brittle notes floated in my ears before it filled the empty air. A middle-aged man was languidly playing the baby grand piano on the plinth in the far corner of the dainty shop. Despite the agreeable atmosphere in the café there was somehow a misplaced impression that lingered in the air that instantly made me feel rather out of place. I sighed inwardly because I could not help it, thinking that he must have forgotten about this engagement.
I mulled over my espresso before I took another careful sip, fidgeting on my seat again, probably for the umpteenth time already and feeling all self-conscious that I was alone in a two-person booth. Everybody else within fifteen meter radius had company.
After settling the pasty demitasse on the polished table, I consciously tucked a stray lock behind my ear.
It was almost a sin to be all alone in a place like this, and the fact that I was solitary had become increasingly uncomfortable like something was about to jump off underneath my skin. I could not quite get rid of the strange feeling.
“Hey.”
In a painfully slow moment of choked sighs and widened eyes, I turned to look behind me, the arresting lazy haze of the coffee overlooked at once. The whole world had seemed to spin faster, had crashed and burned before my eyes in a fraction of a second, but it was the rush of caffeine that was making me so faint.
And then there he was, the one whom I had been waiting for, the man of my dreams, still looking like the way I always remembered him.
“Hey,” I said rather serenely as if reigning my emotions could not any more strain me further, gesturing for him to sit on the chair right across me with a burst of adrenaline running though my veins.
“So,” he started with that noticeable tilt in his deep voice, hanging his coat carefully on the backrest and running a hand to brush his messy brown hair away from those mesmerizing dark eyes that grazed my face effortlessly. “I haven’t seen you around lately. What have you been up to?”
“What have I been up to?” I murmured a recursion intentionally to give myself some time to think of a better response.
Distracting myself a lot lately, I told him in my mind. Or had been trying to.
“I’m making a dissertation for my Literature class, and I’m also working on this thing for the university paper,” instead I rattled on in the most haphazard way I knew and did not look in his eyes or even at his face as I did. He must have known how this tendency always betrayed the awkwardness I felt, but he was thankfully obliging in feigning nonchalance. “All these things are taking over my perfectly normal life. You probably know what I’m talking about. College stuff, driving me crazy. Already in our Senior year, and I’m still not used to the whole roller coaster schedule thing.”
“Fill me in.” He said, sounding almost interested as he leaned on the table, but that was naturally him, indulging at the right moments.
“Oh, no. It’s really nothing.” I forced myself to concentrate on the space between his ear and shoulder. Looking at his face now felt wholly sacrilegious.
You were never truly interested in anything. Not about me, at least, I cynically countered in my head as I finally averted my attention to the laughing couple who sat near the counter, fighting not to visibly wince at my off-putting thoughts.
“But you don’t know that,” he told me. To prove his point, he leaned closer with a slight twitch in the corners of his mouth, a grin forming on his peaceful face. It had been one of his quirks, an almost-habit that I had come to witness since time immemorial. “Don’t worry, I have all night.”
I swallowed an uncomfortable lump in my throat, over-thinking again before plunging head-first in the pool of confusion of my imagination.
“Well, don’t blame me later if I’ve bored you to death.” Thankfully, I managed to return a weak smile as I finally succumbed to the calls of nostalgia with a poorly disguised detachment before I started telling him about the things that made my world, things that were driving me insane, but I could not tell him about how he was fitted into all this.
Maybe it had really been that long that I could still forget how he could seem so engaged to my monologue, how his candid laughter could reflect his real feelings and how his eyes seemed to disappear when he smiled.
“It’s frustrating really,” he said later, absently stirring the cup of tea in front of him with a graceful silver spoon that glimmered against the dimmed lights behind him. A wry grin had graced his brooding countenance this time.
“What is?” I asked, intrigued by the undertone of bitterness in his voice. He had previously started talking about his own activities in a rather lighter mood, and now he was changed.
“I’m not even seeing anybody right now, and it’s still frustrating,” he replied without meeting my eyes.
I refused to remark on it because he would know I knew what it felt like.
“You’re not seeing anyone?”
The question was really for the sake of the conversation.
“No.”
This time I palmed one side of my face as I regarded him through hooded eyes, still wondering about what was really in that beautiful mind of his right that moment.
“No?”
“No.”
I supposed I could have asked him why, but since we were not the people we used to be I decided to leave the reason to himself. I should not be asking about these sort of things somehow because I knew it was not my place to even comment. We were not that kind of friends anymore.
So this was how it was going to be for us. Years had passed and we were separate people with different ambitions, different goals, different plans. I discovered as much when we discussed about more important matters, about life and the future.
“Are you alright? You’re quiet all of a sudden, and it’s sort of freaking me out.” He usually said things like this with an awkward grin to match, but it was more of a way to appease himself of whatever bad was to come when I was being unusually pensive in the midst of a somber conversation.
He reached out his hand to me, lightly resting it on the back of my own. It was a gesture that was achingly familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It was disturbing that it was just like the past.
This was the adventure that I had been anticipating since I let go of my thoughts, and now I was almost regretting it.
Just then this traitorous heart was curiously pounding harder against my chest with the slightest unexpected physical contact, and just then I realized I had been staring at the cooled coffee for a while now, wishing to be anywhere else but this place, previous thoughts falling by the wayside in that instant.
“You know, you can’t really get all the things you want. Even those that you really want so bad, no matter how hard you try. Life’s just like that.”
It’s just not meant to be, is it?
His words that breached my thoughts puzzled me right in that moment as if I could not been any more bemused. In the caffeine-induced dialogue, I was suddenly thinking about him and me in the middle of our conversation.
Him. And me.
“Hey.” That voice was the warmest velvet. I could not remember if I was able to fight a wince from relaying my emotions. “Say something.”
“I’m fine,” I bluntly replied, breaking off the entrancing gaze before he could pull me deeper in those balmy obsidian pools that were his eyes, and immediately I pulled my shaking hand away, gravely contradicting my last statement. It was not the time to care anymore.
By now it was steadily raining outside the ornate windows, a lethargic downpour of mercury that should not be present while the overcast blush of dusk was replacing the afternoon skies. It was by far the saddest picture I had seen today.
“Is that the truth?” He asked another tragic question.
With unstable breath and closed lids, I tried to repress the dull ache that would not go away, the memory of the days that were long gone, and the feelings that should not be there any longer.
It had been wrong right from the start.
“Yes, of course, it is,” I said, sounding harsher than I intended to. My breath had hitched and my chest was just about to burst.
Why can’t it be meant to be?
Confusion painted his usually indecipherable face, and something else like an old guilt. He was so different and yet so constant that it broke my heart to a thousand pieces.
“What were you really thinking of?” The rich baritone of his voice ricocheted in my head, a sound that I had gotten accustomed to.
I could not tell him.
I could not tell him I was thinking about him and me and before.
“Nothing,” I rejoined, but he was not at all convinced.
Something in the air changed that I was almost choking.
“Are you running away again?” He did not even care for my self-preservation anymore, and he rarely spoke without thinking it through.
Before I could remove my other hand on the table he simply captured it in a firm grip, determined to keep me trapped.
“Don’t do this again—please.”
Subtleties were so out of the question now.
My eyebrows creased at his audacity to say such things now. A heavy blur of tears clouded my sight but I knew he had the softest look on his face while he painfully begged. I wanted to believe that he had never wanted to let go, but of course that was far from the truth.
I can’t do it. I can’t. You don’t know that...please don’t make me say that I still—
“Am I so late?” A very harassed man, whose trench coat was almost soaked through with rain, had made his way to our booth in turn interrupting the thick tension with the rhetorical anti-climactic question.
The fragile balance in the air was once again restored, the other patrons’ animation a surprisingly dreary change of scenery.
“Jack.” I could not be more grateful to Jack for the sudden digression. I was not sure what could have happened if he had come a few seconds too late.
It was strange that while Jack was trying to explain while profusely apologizing in between all I could hear was the poignant music that the piano was producing that mingled with the echo of the beating rain, mist descending to my already muddled thoughts.
“Jack, you remember Ethan, right? We’ve been friends since Freshman year.”
It was all I could say about him. We had never been more than that anyway because, as pitiful as it would sound, he had not allowed a relationship like that.
No matter what, I could not pull away from those defeated obsidian spheres even if the hand that held mine had long before liberated it.
“Of course, I do. I’m sorry, I didn’t know Rachel had company.”
“No, forgive me. I didn’t know she was waiting for anyone. She had looked so out of place and lonely.” His effortless smile was back in place as he gracefully shook Jack’s hand in acknowledgment.
“Thank you for keeping my girlfriend busy while I suffered under the dreadful deluge, my fault for making her wait anyway.”
Girlfriend? I was sure that was the question in his eyes.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” He asked noncommittally but there was a sense of betrayal in his tone, and I could only make out a guilty smile for him.
I don’t know. Maybe because I didn’t want to.
“We’ve been seeing each other for almost two years now,” I supplied too readily, the tears rising once again with the bile that did not leave my system.
“Have we really stopped speaking to each other that long?”
It was a rhetorical statement that I was almost deigned to respond if only to satisfy my masochistic tendencies.
I wasn’t running away. You pushed me away, and eventually, I fell out of the loop, and we just stopped being friends altogether.
“I’m sorry but we really don’t have much time now. Jack and I are actually late for a meeting. It had started about thirty minutes ago, too,” I apologized to him, giving him my hand, which he received and gave a melancholic squeeze.
This was the inevitable goodbye, a closure that did not happen years ago, a conclusion that I did not really need when I was just remembering how much I still knew all about him.
“Goodbye, Ethan. I’ll see you around, alright?”
“Sure,” he said in a rather sorry voice.
The delicate open bars of the piano and percussion permeated the cheerless ambiance.
“You have a great night, Ethan.”
“Take care of her, Jack,” he extracted one last cryptic undertaking before Jack confusedly acceded with a nod.
When we reached the door, I dared one last fleeting glance at his face, wanting to immortalize that final remembrance, but he was not even looking at me. His exclusive attention was locked on the woman singing by the piano in the scaffold.
You give your hand to me and then you say hello,
and I can hardly speak, my heart is beating so.
And anyone can tell you think you know me well,
but you don’t know me.
“Is something the matter?” Jack asked me quietly when I eventually ceased on my tracks.
No, you don’t know the one who dreams of you at night,
who wants to kiss your lips and longs to hold you tight.
To you I’m just a friend, that’s all I’ve ever been,
because you don’t know me.
“Nothing. I was just...thinking,” I told him pensively when he pierced through my trance, hating myself for being such a coward, for wanting so many things. With a weary sigh, I went back on Jack and me.
“You know, maybe I’ll just go alone and you stay here. I’ll just pick you up later. I don’t suppose the chief’s going to keep us that long anyway.”
“It’s okay, really.” I offered an assuring smile that could not reach my eyes.
“If you say so. But if you still want to stay—”
I shook my head with an air of finality before I slipped my fingers between Jack’s. It was a guilty act of distracting him. I knew for sure that if I had chosen to stay longer, the past was just going to catch up on me again.
Jack gave me a long look as if trying to read what was in my mind. He only beamed mysteriously when a minute had passed and curled his long fingers against mine before he led me out the café.
I have to move on.
*****
You give your hand to me and then you say goodbye.
I watch you walk away beside that lucky guy.
No, you’ll never, never know the one who loves you so,
because you don’t know me...
How could I just watch her leave like that?
