“Do you ever wonder about us?”
I had imagined this so many times – this conversation – but
somehow I hadn’t ever imagined it like this, without any fireworks or
skywriting. Instead we stood outside a storefront of a bar, tipsy, with rain
drizzling around us. I thought we’d be drunker or that we’d have cigarettes,
this seemed like a conversation that could’ve been punctuated with well-timed
exhalations of smoke. But we weren’t drunk enough to write this off and we
weren’t the same dumb young people who thought cancer burning between their
teeth meant we were interesting. We were older now, not much wiser. But wise
enough for me to know that I’d been staring a beat too long and he was doing
his nervous shuffle from foot to foot.
“All the time.” I exhaled and it was just cold enough that
fog followed my words making it as dramatic as cigarette smoke.
He leveled me with a look of mild surprise, cheeks rosy with
the alcohol or the chill it was hard to tell. This was one of those silences
that could’ve benefitted from a quick puff of smoke from each of us, to fill
the space.
“Me too.” He said, looking away and squinting into the
distance.
Being a narrative type, I thought the moment was a tad
anti-climactic, and I was reminded how devastatingly non-fictional I was.
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