I remember the day we both went up to your room after meeting for coffee and you asked if I wanted to listen to any of your CDs but we ended up listening to one another’s heartbeats instead, so abruptly it was like a fault line had opened up between us. And there was none of that awkwardness like when we had that stupid conversation about our favorite kinds of pizza just to make small talk; all our awkwardness fell away with our clothes.
And I swear that when you removed my dress, you removed my skin with it too, because my heart started beating so loud you could physically feel it beneath your hand. You know, sometimes I think of that night as a chance meeting between strangers, like when you look at someone on the subway at the exact moment they happen to be looking at you, and for a split second you wonder who they’re going home to tonight, if anyone.
That maybe we just had a meeting like that, something that wasn’t fate, just chance. It just happened. Something you can’t control. It’s like the homeless man I saw the other day walking on the street by himself, and he slipped and fell in the mud, so a little kid ran up and shoved a fistful of yellow flowers into his hand. And even though he was still in the mud, he looked a little happier than before.
Sometimes I wonder if you and I were like that. If we went through all those hard times, the times when I tried to hold you through all those panic attacks in your car, the times when I caught you looking at someone else or you drunk drove and ran over the neighbor’s cat. If there was all this darkness between us and inside us, but maybe we had that little bit of brightness in the end too, just like those flowers.