HAPPY HOUR
there are always things left undone
I walked past the bar we always wanted to try, it was never a quite Happy Hour, we never quite made it.
I have always associated home with the late-night walks by the dock, looking into the Manhattan skyline, and the halal food eaten sitting on the bench by the water. Somewhere in between the city lights and the R&B played in your dimly lit car with the bass pounding against my ear, I started associating you with home. It was always that one song, the one about a man missing the girl of his dreams after time spent away from her, and how easy it was to love her. I wonder now if it was that easy to love her, why was it so easy to leave.
Coming home this time was different. I look the same as I did when we last said goodbye, except I’m a little less tan, smelling like orange blossoms as opposed to the wisteria I’d put on before seeing you each day; but for the first time in 5 years, I was no longer tied to you. In fact, for the first time in a long time, I have no ties to you, except for this place. I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about you, but not in an “I miss you” or “I still love you” kind of way — I wonder about your life now and I hope you are happy. You seem to be at least. Somewhere in an alternate universe, one where we were still friends, I’d tell you about the boy, the one that showed me what healthy love is like and how he’s doing everything I wish you would’ve done.
Do you remember that conversation we had, at 4 am? Liquid courage, I had told you, was what I needed to get through the conversation. The one where I asked you exactly what you were thinking, where your head was at. The one where you told me that timing just wasn’t right. I had read between the lines and knew you meant, you weren’t ready, and that was okay. I knew that this would happen, as cliche as it was, from the first time I met you I knew you’d be a heartache waiting to happen. I knew you would be a good guy to the next girl, but she just wasn’t me, and for that, I am thankful.
As much as I would love to hate you, I can’t. I shared all the secrets I had with you, the little bits of shame, the random tantrums, and the fights sitting in the driveway of my house. I don’t think anyone knew me as well as you did. The way you drove hours to see me, no matter the time. I loved you for it. You peeled back all the bits of me to the point where I didn’t care how bruised and fragile you were. In the back of my head, I knew it would never last, you were like salt and lime seeping deep into my cuts, but I couldn’t get enough. I remember how I thought we’d be friends that lived in the same neighborhood when we were 40, with dinner parties and vacations together. I don’t think that it would happen now. In the good days, you showed me what it was like to share and to care for someone as deeply as you could — so much that my heart ached with you; and in the bad days, you taught me how to leave, and that sometimes the right thing is the hardest thing and the last option you’d want to resort to.
I never expected it to end the way it did- on a random Tuesday night where the last thing you said wasn’t goodbye but a kiss on my forehead. The first and last time you would ever do that. As I walk through the city now, past the restaurants and bars we had been to, and all the ones we didn’t. We never quite did make it, did we?
