There's a thing we call heartbreak

There are times when she wonders what the future will bring. Once upon a time the little girl in her would have looked at him from across the crowded room and planned out colors, flavors, flowers, even scouted locations for that perfect little chapel or pavillion. But years of planning her ultimately doomed wedding blurred that instinct into nothing more than vague preferences (some shade of blue with maybe silver?, definitely not chocolate, and something more original than roses--as for locations, she's not even sure where she'll be living next year so it doesn't really seem worth it to worry about that hypothetical quite yet). Besides, this crowded room is no place for a little girl, even only inside her.

Still, she does wonder at times if they'll ever get there. He's not the one she was expecting, but the one she was expecting (who wasn't her fiance, by the way, and the irony of that still hits her a little too often for comfort) never actually gave her a chance to explain herself much less start anything real with him. So when the unexpected happens in spite of all your wondering and planning, that doesn't really mean you should kill the planning process entirely, does it?

There's no harm in expecting things even if realistically you sort of doubt they'll ever happen. What would be the point, after all, if your life was totally devoid of thoughts about the future. She thinks about this sometimes and then the inevitable realization comes that she doesn't have to wonder what that would be like because in most of her moments, the ones when she's not wondering about things, that's what her life is like now. She lives in the present and only the present.

The past is either too dull or too painful to be worth remembering. The future is either too baffling or too terrifying to be worth contemplating. So instead she's shopping for a new pair of gladiators that would be totally impractical if she lived in a place where she actually had to worry about snow more than for the twenty-three steps it takes her to get from the door of her building to the subway stairs. Instead she's slipping under again after her fourth sampling of whatever he felt like buying that night and then she's slowly tilting her body against his in rhythm to the too-loud music and flashing colors and then she's falling asleep on his bony shoulder in the cab he hailed like a tourist because they were both too wasted to supervise the getting home process.

Instead of taking art classes and spending hours in the park she's living the life of a woman a decade younger and a thousand times cooler than she should be. Her life is nothing like what that little girl was expecting.

But I don't think my heart's ever let me down

He wonders if he'd even recognize her now. In those desperate, fumbling moments when he quits trying to tell himself that he isn't looking for her (as if you could even find someone in a place so big), he thinks about how much he's changed since then and how she must have done the same.

He's no longer that bored overqualified, underachieving salesman she knew so well. (If only she hadn't known him that well!) He has a real job now, a career in fact, selling something more profitable than paper in a glossy modern office with windows on two sides. And he's good at it. And he likes it. But it's still not quite enough.

His picture of her is so pure. His innocent little girl with her big brown eyes and her unwittingly endearing smile. Those images are so completely her that trying to imagine what the years, the distance, and this place must have done to her is like trying to picture a beach without the water. She can't have changed so very much he thinks, or hopes, or maybe just naively wants.

But I still cry

And after all they were never really even in love.

It's what she whispers to herself as she falls asleep in that unexpected man's arms.

It's what he cries out in panic at the end of another long week.

Because how can you be in love, really, when you never got the chance to say it back? And how can you be in love, really, when you were too scared to face the uncertain aftermath.

Sure she felt it, but had she ever done a damn thing about it? Sure he felt it, but had he felt it enough to try again?

Because I can't always have it my way

The rain slips down over the city. With so much in the way it can't even seem to drop cleanly from the sky. She gets it secondhand after it bounces blindly into the concrete and steel high up above her. Spring storms bring flowers in other places, but here you have to buy them from the third floor of her multi-level grocery store, or from the little cart around the corner and down three blocks from her latest temp job.

And sometimes crying can help you out

Stamford was never meant to be a permanent solution. It took him all of three months to post his resume, secure housing in a squished little studio he shared for half a year with some other guy who's name he can't remember now, and pack up everything he hadn't already stored in boxes in his parent's attic.

Sing it aloud

It's a specific kind of nomadism. She hops from sublet to sublet because it's easier than admitting that this is permanent and so much easier than moving in with that unexpected man.

Scream

He knows it shouldn't be this hard. Regret would be understandable and temporary grief completely fitting, but he shouldn't still have trouble falling asleep. Not now after so much time has passed. Though he often blames the noise and the ever-shifting lights that drift across his ceiling, he knows they're not the real problems.

Shred your lungs

In the mornings she blames the hangovers for the red in her eyes and the rings underneath them. The unexpected man almost always buys it. And those few times when he doesn't she's elusive enough to keep him from asking about anything too specific or too painful. Sometimes it's easier to play the ingenue from the small town, just here for a kaleidescopic whirlwind of pulsing sensation, than try to convince him that she really is turning thirty in December, and she really does know a few things--things like the difference between permanently breaking up and permanently breaking your own heart.

I need to hear you louder now

It happens on a Wednesday evening as the sun is fading and the neon and flourescent replacements are beginning to illuminate exactly how artificial a real, natural, everyday life can be. In the glow of seven o'clock he spots her coming out of a Starbucks. And what strikes him first is that in spite of the years of furtive staring at the faces of the women he passes on the street, he might have passed her before and he might not have known because his suspicions were right and she's only barely recognizable.

She's smaller somehow than he remembered and it's not just because she's thinner now than she was then.

It takes him a full minute of following her down the not-so-very-crowded sidewalk to get up the guts to tap her with two fingers on the side of her arm and say her name.

She turns and her eyes go from faintly annoyed to painfully wide to hollow. And then she says his name like a question and he remembers to take another breath so he can say something back.

and sing as if you'll never sing again

"Wow," he says as the silence sets in.
"Yeah."
"So, what are you doing here?" she asks.
"I, uh, I live here now."
"Oh, um, yeah, I guess I probably heard that from someone. Uh, so do I, actually."
"Yeah, I think I knew that."
"Oh."

and when the morning comes

She wants to sound like herself. Well not her little-girl self, she wants to sound like the self that she is now. She can manage the disinterested, slightly sneering cadences of her caste in nearly every other situation, so why not now when she truly needs them most.

Perhaps it's because her hair is messy with the end-of-summer humidity and she only tossed on an old sweater, a faded pair of jeans, and some converse sneakers before heading out for coffee and a trip to the atm. Perhaps it's just him. But whatever the reason, she's reverting to her middle-school, stumbling words self and she hates that this is happening now of all times.

So she prepares to say goodbye, thinking with some small part of her mind that maybe that's all she's needed this whole time. Just a chance to acknowledge their parting of the ways. Just a chance to know it's really and forever over.

and your throat is sore

He's losing her. She's giving him this blank stare and he knows like it's something she said out loud that this is his only chance. So he keeps talking, hoping she'll give him enough time to put into action one of the many plans he's devised for this situation in the wakeful nights since he learned she was here.

He keeps it light. There are too many things to say and too many ways to screw up this fragile situation. He wants to tell her he's never stopped thinking about her, but he tells her that he just got promoted. It's true, but not all that important.

you'll face the day

When he asks for her number and says they should go out to lunch sometime so they can really catch up she tries her very hardest to refuse him. It would not be a good idea to accept. She knows this. She knows she'll spend the next week distracting herself by tossing on another digit to her credit card debt and opening her mouth wide to twist tongues with a random stranger in a club while that unexpected man's off getting them something new to drink.

She's not that little girl anymore. She knows what she's become, and because of that she knows it would never work to try to pretend to be friends with him, even if she wanted it to, which she doesn't because who would really want to go back to a past that painful? What she knows and he couldn't possibly guess is that she could never deserve him now.

Not that she ever really did.

But even knowing all that, she pulls out her phone and programs his number, dials it until they hear his phone ring in his pocket, hangs up, and then smiles in a way she hasn't in years.

She can't help it. She never could around him. Obviously.

like you did before

There are still too many things to say. Too many ways this could crumple or go up in smoke. But he has her number. He has that familiar, semi-sad smile. He has the street lights reflecting off her corkscrew curls. And for a second there he had those innocent brown eyes in a face he almost wouldn't have recognized. And those things put together like that are enough.

For now those things are enough. For now until they meet in some sticky sandwich shop and he coaxes a giggle out from between her lips, for now until he drags her to a gallery opening and they both pretend not to notice that his hand is on the small of her back when they walk through the door, for now until they finally talk about what really happened and what they were both thinking all those years ago, for now until he pries her out of her new life and back into his, for now those things are enough.

with a smile on in the end

As she walks on toward the bank she wonders, with a tiny echo of a smile on her face, how the vague preferences she didn't like to think about just fifteen minutes ago have already begun to shift back into tangible specifics (royal blue and silver, vanilla with raspberry filling and buttercream frosting, pale yellow daisies mixed with orange blossoms in her parent's oldest friends' backyard). She wonders if the future, though still baffling and terrifying, is actually worth contemplating after all. And most of all she wonders why she didn't let herself expect even once that he would be the one to come find that little girl in her again.