“Please.”
It was an eternity of longing decanted into one syllable, as heavy as the first drink after the last goodbye. My insides should have been wringing themselves in empathetic agony. Instead, they sat quietly, if a little bored.
I wasn’t always like this. I used to be good and kind and give and give and give until I was so hollow my pain found echoes. You always hear it said that you should never push a kind person to the point where they don’t care anymore- but people so rarely listen to sound advice. And here we are. My edges razored by all the people I was but am no longer.
“Please.”
Again. His voice a moment away from breaking.
My reflection stared back up from my phone screen, eyes glowing green and swimming in apathy. I waited for it. To feel the weight that’s supposed to crush you, the desperation closing around my throat. Instead I smelled that particular damp-pavement smell that precedes the storms as they crawl through the sky. Tasted the gentle burn of tobasco on my tongue and wondered absently how a year could change so much. I had thought he could be the one- wanted him to be. Instead we sat here watching the Flatiron building cast heavy shadows as the clouds crept in.
“I’m sorry. It’s about to rain, I should go.”
“I.” The "I” that had begun as a giddy “we.”
He wasn’t heartbroken. Not really. That’s what I told myself. Just sullen at the idea he had not been enough. A bruised ego was nothing a pretty girl in a loud bar couldn’t fix. I didn’t look back at his kid face with the fear of life alone in his eyes. He never understood, not really, how one could fall in love with the sutras of never stopping, always moving.
A tinny voice asked me to “stand clear of the closing doors, please.” The oil slick spread across my shoulders ruffled as they snapped shut and I felt as though I could finally exhale. That’s the thing about the subway. It’s a moment of silence as you hurtle beneath busy streets. Is it odd that I often think of it as a place of solitude? But then I lock eyes with a tousle-haired stranger with a tired face and am overwhelmed by a strange sense of family. We’re all the same. Here, together. A collection of broken things in the land of lost toys.
As I wedged myself between people smelling of expensive perfume and cheap wine- a faint sourness- that was when I felt it. A pang like a needle being worked through the fat of my lips. I thought because he saw through my cool exterior, the one hand-crafted by Italian artisans to mask the howling, baying mess of confusion and desperation, that he understood. Here was a person who understood.
But he never did. He thought he could save me, fix me, mold me into his ideal version of me. And it made sense. I had always been at once unsure, and yet beyond certain. Drunk on that heady mixture of anticipation mingled with dread. But people can’t keep waiting and hoping forever. They fracture. They unravel. They become desperate and do something stupid. They evolve.
After all, we were all at one point something else. We will all become something else again. And the world will keep spinning as the trains continue to rattle beneath the city. Ferrying their broken family home.