Second Chance
A fantasy
She dropped down into the seat next to me, much to my surprise. I hadn’t even realized she was there at all, and now she was right by my arm. I could’ve touched her, and felt her hand in mine again. Instead, I stared, confused at her actions, afraid at what she might say. Her eyes were bright, as they always had been.
“Hi!” she said excitedly. Her hand extended towards me and froze between us. She told me her name, as if I hadn’t been muttering it in my sleep for months on end. Then she asked me for mine. I stared at her hand which hovered expectantly in front of me.
“What are you doing?” I asked her. The light in her eyes didn’t falter.
“Introducing myself. What’s your name?” she repeated.
I did not give it to her. She knew my name. She knew it as well as I know hers. My name was the one that used to follow the words “I love” when she spoke them, just as hers followed those same words from my own mouth. My name was the one she had written into her phone with small beating hearts standing at either end. My name was the one she sobbed amidst her apologies months ago, when she decided to remove my name from her heart.
“What do you want?” I asked, slowly. I expected her to continue her act, feigning a first encounter, as if my heartbreak was amnesia, but this time, for the briefest moment, the light behind her eyes disappeared, and her facade with it. She answered me.
“We want” she said, emphasizing the first word to indicate the both of us “a second chance.”
As I let the words sink in, the sparks in her eyes returned, and her smile, and her act. A second chance I thought. Even after all the pain she had caused me, I couldn’t say no. My hand grasped hers, and we shook once, with rigidity. I told her my name, deciding that I would play her game. There was nothing left to lose.
She leaned back in her chair, and we both faced forward. She spoke, speaking my name as if for the first time, tasting its sound, watching my ears perk up at her voice. “That’s an interesting name” she continued. “I used to know someone with that name. I used to care about him more than everything in the world.”
“What a coincidence” I responded, too dryly. “The same goes for yours.”
She pressed her lips together. Apparently she had hoped that I would play along more willingly, but she pressed on. “Is it alright if I got to know you a little better?”
“Icebreakers!” she lit up as if the answer was obvious and not at all stupid for two people who have known and loved each other for years to play icebreakers. “I’ll ask you a question, and you’ll ask me one, and we’ll keep going like that. You go first.”
The questions I could’ve asked her. Why did you leave me? Why did you give me nothing but silence for so long? What are you doing here now with me? What is it that you’re trying to gain, what more could you possibly want?
“Your favorite color?” I knew the answer already, but I longed to hear her say it again.
“Blue!” Her favorite color hadn’t changed, no more than her eye color could have. I heard her laugh, and I could’ve cried; I didn’t think I would ever hear her laugh again. Now it was her turn.
“What do you want to be when you finish school?” She knew the answer to that question as well as I knew the answer to mine, but I indulged her.
“Many things.” When her eyes begged me to elaborate, I did. “A doctor, a father, happy…” I could’ve continued, but she seemed happy to hear the answer she knew to be true. The game had come back to me.
“What’s your real hair color?” I asked, observing the dark brown locks that curled over her shoulder which were foreign to me.
“I’m really a blonde” she replied. “I dyed my hair just to see how it would look.” For a brief moment, she broke character, and asked me something that a true stranger would not have. “Do you like it?”
I shrugged. “I imagine you looked better as a blonde” was my sly response. She smiled.
Our game continued, as if we were on our way to becoming new friends and not trying to desperately call each other old ones. We questioned each other, pretending to be blind to our history.
“What do you do for fun?”
“Do you have any siblings?”
“Do you have any pets?”
I grew tired of it. The questions I wanted to ask her were the ones that would break her rules. So instead, I asked her: “Do you miss him?”
Her smile vanished, her eyes dulled. She knew what I meant, and so she stared at me, solemn. When she nodded, my heart beat faster, and I looked away because I was afraid she would see the redness in my face. “Your turn” I croaked, adhering to her rules.
She hesitated. I expected her to ask the converse of my question, even though, like all the others, she would already know the answer. Again, she surprised me. “Would you kiss me?”
I told her “yes”, and proceeded to demonstrate the truth of my answer.
Our lives continued from that day forth the way we had always hoped they would. We finished school together, became professionals together, traveled the world together. We took more pictures together than anyone but us would ever have the patience to see. We watched the movies that she loved and I hated, and the movies that I loved and she hated, and the movies that we both loved, and the movies that we both hated, just so we could laugh the whole way through. I played for her the music I had written, and she showed me the art that she made. Our mornings, noons, and nights revolved around each other. We had picnics at every hour of the day, in every season of the year. We enjoyed late nights of studying together, late nights of cooking together, late nights of laying side-by-side in cool grasses and counting stars. Some nights grew so late they became sunrises, and we enjoyed them too. Some nights I drifted off to sleep with her arm on my chest, and other nights she drifted off to sleep with my below her head.
Through it all, the game continued. We never mentioned the complex history we had built together already. We both turned a blind eye to the building that was beyond saving, and instead worked together to build a new one, from the ground up. I knew where the bricks went because of memory, not intuition. I knew how to love her not because I was learning to, but because I always had. Our old jokes did not survive, but we made new ones. Our old love had changed, and become stronger now.
We married, we bought a house, we raised children in its walls. One had her golden hair, and one had my dark. One had her blue eyes, and one my brown. They were beautiful, and happy, like we knew they would be.
We lived together, worked together, grew together, learned and loved together. One day it would come time for us to die together. Until that day came, she filled my life with more happiness than I could handle, and I did the same for her. Whichever one of us died first, the other would not grieve, because our lives, the ones we shared, were full, and beautiful, and happy. Together, we were complete. My last breath was the faint whisper of her name on my lips; the name I knew and loved long before the day she came back to me.
As I lay here on my bed, writing words best left unsaid, I wonder of the life I could have led…
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