TILL DEATH DO US PART | JENLISA

THIRTEEN

JENNIE

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After All

September 8th, 2015

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If fear makes time fly, then expectation makes it moves like an arthritic snail.

It’s been three years since I saw Lisa last, but it feels like it’s been a millennia. And that last time is bright in my memory regardless of how much time has passed. It was at graduation where she stood kitty corner to me. When I looked back to capture the image of her, she stared through me like I had never mattered to her at all. Like I didn’t even exist, and in many ways, I don’t feel like I do without her.

Literally, the only reason I’ve been able to get past the vacancy in her last look was by pinning all my hopes on this moment. I’ve waited, I’ve stayed away so she could grow into the woman she was supposed to. I’ve worked and studied, I’ve pushed toward my goals, dumping every shred of myself into school. I’ve bided my time and dreamed for this day. It’s surreal that it’s finally come.

Because here I am, exactly where I was in another life. It feels the same, I think. Just as I did before, I stand with a cab door in my hand. The misting of rain coming down around me as I feel Broadway Avenue under my heels.

And though my fears this time are different, I’m still afraid. Because, well, this moment is the most important one in our lives together. It’s the original moment where I fell in love with her. This is the night that started it all. And standing here in the drizzle, I don’t really feel it because my heart is committed to feeling nothing but hope that I haven’t wrecked everything between us.

I swallow nervously, taking in the massive glass structure before me. Did I completely ruin everything for us?

I clip the cab door shut and straighten my back despite that question being the thing I’m too afraid to ask. With a rock of dread in my stomach, I crunch over the asphalt and the shards of others broken dreams. I rush across the street, chasing the running rivers of light reflected on the wet ground. My breath plumes into the dazzling city lights swirling around me.

I push my way through bodies that crowd the sidewalk before Alice Tully’s Music Hall. I don’t know if they are the same people I had butt my shoulder against before, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I know I’m following watery lights toward an impossible dream that has found a way to not shatter on the sidewalk. And just like I did a lifetime ago I stop before the glass doors, staring at the elegant frosted engravings on them.

They have the shimmer of promise that I couldn’t see before because I had no way to know that my future laid on the other side.

But now I do and I pray it still does.

With familiar, yet shaking hands, I grab the silver handle and pull open the doors.

A firm hand takes the door from me chivalrously, and I slide inside quickly. “Thank y...” When I turn around, the man is holding the door for his family. I swallow my words, because he won’t hear me anyway. I turn back to the entrance. A passing person jostles me, and I glare at her back as she keeps moving. I hate this city. I’ll never get used to people treating me like I’m nothing.

I am something though. I’m Jennie Fucking Kim, and saying my name now, should give me the strength to keep moving, but it doesn’t and it’s not because my knee is sore as hell. It’s because all I can do is gape at the enormity of the entrance, the sunken eating areas and raised planters that shoot over my head in cascades of greenery.