The End of Love
To miss you again is to be nothing. It’s to drift through my days as a ghost. I walk through this old city and stare up at buildings that remind of you, and of a time when I truly felt at home. I see a familiar rooftop in the distance and flash back to the moment I dangled my legs off of it and laid my head to rest on your shoulder.
We were basking in the heat and silence that followed yet another loud and boisterous night, and even though I couldn’t see your face, I could tell that your head was tilted back, and your eyes were closed, and you were smiling. We listened to the late night traffic in the dark, and I stared at the empty street below and could hear some honking in the distance. There was that 3am orange-yellow glow the streetlamps always cast over everything at that time of night, and every so often a solitary car would rumble its way past and break the silence we’d managed to fill with every unsaid, pretty thing.
I sighed a deep, content sigh and tried to find the moon but couldn’t, and you kind of laughed and without any warning turned and – very quickly, very softly, almost imperceptibly – kissed the top of my head, and I nuzzled closer into the crook of your neck. We’d never been this close before, and I wondered what had brought us here. It must have been the culmination of every fleeting, passing gesture, and every stolen look, and every secret smile shared just between the two of us across a loud and crowded room. Or maybe it was just the quiet, and the heat.
I felt like you were my home then, and I was grateful for it, because the city could get so lonely on a hot summer night if you had no one to sit in the dark with. I reached out and held your hand and you didn’t stop me, or pull away, or make a joke about it, and that’s when I knew that no matter how fleeting it might be, in that moment there was something true between us, and something real – a kind of electricity some people go their whole lives trying to describe or to explain, but never can. It was some subtle and quiet but all-consuming thing, yet even in its gravity I still felt at peace, and that’s how I knew you had some part of me I’d never get back.
And then the sound of footsteps on the fire escape, and soon after a voice some distance behind us.
“What are you guys doing? Hurry up.”
And just like that the moment passed, and I lifted my head from your shoulder, turned and caught a glint moonlight in your eye. You half-smiled, stood up, reached out and said,
“Come on, let’s go.”
And I took your hand and laughed while you pulled me up.
Right now, I would go anywhere with you, I thought, while we stepped back into the shadows, but I dared not say it out loud. There’s always been some kind of magic in the silence of those summer nights, and I knew better than to break the spell.
And now as I drift through these familiar streets, I wonder if the magic’s gone, and where it might be, and if I might find it again, hidden away somewhere on a rooftop in the dark.
