It's funny watching life moving around you. Flowing as a river does around a rock. The currents of time are almost visible. I stand outside, watching the waters ebb and flow through the people around me. A glance to the right shows a couple, hand in hand, talking in blissful contentment, simply enjoying being together. It makes me wonder what their life together is like. Does he treat her well? Does she run around behind his back, living a double life in plain sight? These are a few of the questions that rattle and shift like pebbles in that immortal riverbed. Though these questions fill my mind, this is not about those two strangers.
I glance to the left, towards the crux of this tale. Two young lovers, or maybe ex-lovers, stand in the chill November day, talking. I have to rephrase that. One, a young blonde girl, is talking. Actually, I need to amend that statement as well. She is pleading, begging, her lover about something I can only hazard guesses at. The other, she is a mystery to me. I want to say that I am watching two females, but it is hard to tell. I watch the gender-unspecific person stand as if a statue; no emotion or words playing across her face. It's almost as if she has already cried every tear, yelled every curse, and heard all the words she has to. This young lady, whom I decide at that moment to classify as female, is done.
The blonde goes for multiple hugs, but the statue stands pat, hands never leaving her pockets. The air around me grows even more chill and I'm not sure that little miss statue isn't the source. I pull my jacket tighter around me, sip from my coffee, and continue watching the tragic play unfold before me. I wonder what the blonde could have done to receive the frosty return she is getting now. Did she cheat? Did she lie? Did she insult? I quickly fix that in my mind. Cheating is a lie and an insult. Love is not a word to be casually thrown around. I wonder if the statue would agree with me. With the way times have made relationships, three simple words have become hard to say, let alone mean.
I watch the statue move, which draws me out of my internal reverie, and watch her arms slide around the blonde. On the surface, to anyone watching, it looks like a simple hug, but it is anything but simple - there is no emotion behind it. The blonde realizes the same thing and breaks down, her head falling her now ex-lovers shoulder and crying. I feel for both sides of this situation, but as they say, young love ends like this all the time. With a pause, the statue hands her the vest she was wearing and walks away. The blonde holds the jacket to her face, almost as if she would kiss that unfeeling material and it would reach the one who was not out of her reach.
Watching love die from the inside of a relationship is hard, but watching from the outside is no easy task either. The words I write as I remember watching their sad dance does not give either of them justice. I wish I could see the future and the past, seeing what happened and what time has in store for them, but that isn't possible. With their loss still fresh in my mind, I look at my phone and the messages from my own statue and sigh, remembering those three words that I will never hear.
No comments:
Post a Comment