Despair In The Apartment Lounge

63| a choice of you

Song title from:
'A Choice of Three'
~short story by Alex Turner

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There you sat, across from me.

A tiny espresso cup has your finger looped around its handle, and above it, stained red by the red of your lipstick, a shade of which only few can pull off with the grand inclusion of you. Ridiculously tall and beautiful buildings stretch on and on beyond you, its scenery loomingly present behind myself too.

Every now and then you stop speaking to let me intrude with my own recital of stories or broaching of thought, nodding your head as I divulge you with redundant particulars that bear no significance to the central plot, but you keep nodding and squinting as if these minor features to the stories greatly amuse you, so I add on to the particulars however much I can to preserve your interest.

Half of your face would hide behind the tiny cup as you sip your drink, still nodding and squinting as I rejoice in your willingness to listen to me speak and how you appear to enjoy my speaking as well. Then the cup would find itself on the circular glass table between us again, and that tight smile you have always acquired when something delights you is revealed once more.

I love you. I loved you.
And I probably will always love you.

You signify a juncture of time in me life when I had still been carrying around the bits of remaining innocence only a 20-something youth can harness -an innocence and naivety that was starting to naturally extract itself completely from me, caused by so many factors that had been happening in the lads and I's lives, but mainly because you had abruptly appeared in mine.

If anyone were due credit for leniently teaching me on how to mature, it's you.

Three weeks.
Exactly twenty-one days.

From the moment we had stepped off the plane and stepped onto New York land, there hasn't been a day where you and I don't venture into places we'd been before so many years ago, places that hold significance to our past 'us'. Or places that neither of us have ever visited nor heard of prior, but had just happened to stumble upon as we strolled along the busy bustling streets, talking for hours and hours because there is so much to catch up on.

Allow me to amuse you for a brief moment to explain something. I've realized that somewhere, there exists a significantly long line that is the timeline of our lives. It starts from the age of 0, to me now 38, and you 40. And then, at the tail of this imaginary line there rests a gap to mark our fourteen years of omission from each other.

Though those 14 years is a presentation of our mutual absence from the others life, it had been a cavity filled in by many others. At many points in those years we both had fallen in and out of love with other people. I, myself, had gotten engaged and unengaged and then even married for an embarrassingly short time (though admittedly it had been a rather hasty engagement to begin with and it had ultimately come a cropper anyway); and you yourself had at some point been engaged and unengaged as well.

We had found solace in other people, the way we had done so from each other at one point in the past.

Personally speaking, because I can only speak for meself; but your absence in my life weren't that suffocating.

It's indisputable that the first few months following the break up, I was absolutely clouded with melancholy and irrational rage, but afterward I garnered enough reason to accept it. We've talked about this before, during one of the nights we spent together in bed -you had asked me if my being 'so okay' shortly after our separation was possibly due to my meeting another woman, the person whose name we still feel the need to tiptoe over most times. I replied yes, and also no. The former answer being closer to the truth.