I imagine us meeting at abandoned towns with rundown coffee shops, and words would stumble out of our mouths like the way it used to when I first met you that night. But this time the conversations aren’t laced with the sweet perfume of coffee or the tang of nicotine on the back of our throats. Instead, the words you tell me are filled with all the bitterness you’ve had to live through for so long after our departure, and the back of my throat holds a lump of words I should’ve been able to say years ago.
I imagine us sitting on the backseats of our car and having nothing to say to the other—silence was never quiet when shared with you; wandering through the Great Perhaps of things with perpetual felicity. Time is a constant that ceases to move with your hands on mine, and my theory of infinite realities feels like an infinite cycle of dreams with my lips pressed against yours.
So when I say I imagine our cars breaking down in a town that had once been in a map and is now no more, I imagine us finding the other in an abandoned coffee shop, indulging ourselves in all the nostalgia that came in with the extra cups of Memory, and I imagine us looking each other in the eye longer than we ever have. There’d be no waiter to interrupt us every time were about to have our “almost real” conversation, and then we wouldn’t be able to talk about the coast and the sunrise without falling in love.
There’d be no creaking doors, no chairs dragged across the floor, no holes on the walls, no noise in our heads, no shattered mirrors, no aroma of ground coffee lingering around to distract us from looking each other in the eye, and there’d be no reception in our phones so we wouldn’t have to pretend to be busy.
And afterwards, we can drag our exhausted bodies across the gravel near the lake where I threw my letters away, and maybe then, for the first time after a long time, we can sit across the sunset and have our heartbeats slow down, and I’ll finally have you telling me all your stories of tragedy that’ll make me fall in love with you all over again.
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Feature Artwork: Nighthawks by Edward Hopper
The writer just wrote my words