Chapter 1:
There is something I must confess. I am a broken down weathered hull of a man, hopeless and hollow. I’m sorry if that is too real for you right now, but it’s the truth. Trust me it hurts me more than it hurts you. I am cold, callus, and calculating, often times conniving, and for those of you who have actually taken the time to read any of my stories can attest, I am absolutely batshit crazy. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I’m also selfish; I am flawed, alone in an island of lost and abandoned misfit toys. Consumed by the darkness, I am the night, the Dark Knight. I am Batman.
Well, maybe not exactly Batman. Maybe if we took away the cowl and the cape, the billionaire playboy philanthropist aspect of it, took away the crime fighting element, the sleuthing, the kick-ass ninja skills, the overall badassery, and the rugged good looks, how about we just take away everything. You know what, my mistake I’m not Batman at all. Well, that was misleading. My apologies for such a terrible analogy. We haven’t even started this story yet, and already I’ve given you a lackluster protagonist that isn’t worth his weight in words. Even if I was a super hero, which I assure you I am not, my only super power would be self sabotage. Since I don’t know how to make relationships work, I destroy them before they can get any traction because although I loathe the loneliness it is all I can come to grips with, it is all I know, and that’s all there is you need to understand a day in the life of Kevin. This is the story of a cynic.
How is it you ask we got here? What is left to tell, where could this possibly end up, and why do I have to begin writing this story? Because I just have to, okay. It’s ingrained in my brain which is shouting out from the depths telling me that I bloody-well have to for the sake of my own sanity, that’s why. Plus, I don’t have to explain anything to you, read it or don’t, most likely you won’t. So what’s the difference? No one is paying me for this bull shit. Who ever gave two shits about these stories to begin with. I’m not your hero, I’m not even your anti-hero, I might very well be the villain in the story of my own life. I sure as hell act like one. I wrote this story for my own selfish reasons. I wrote this because I’m afraid that if I spend too much time in the shadows all my light will diminish and If I don’t find somebody to pull me out of the darkness, then it will forever cast a shadow upon my very soul. I mean no big deal, no pressure to become better or anything, just the fate of my entire being resting on the balance of the weight of my enormous demons.
It all began when somebody recently prodded and asked me,
“Were you not a writer once?
You used to post these elaborate stories on Facebook. What happened to that?”
You see what had happened was– flashback to an alternate past where words were once weapons of mass destruction and I thought the sun would never set on the battle field of these war of words. Until the day I fell at the hands of her heart wrenching blade.
Women: they come and they go, stabbing their nails like daggers into my heart and twisting, finishing at my throat, leaving me for dead. Somehow I’m still alive, but borrowed time feels like life support right now with a DNR signed on my chart, and I have lost the will to survive. The pain of heartbreak has cut out my ability to form any of my thoughts into soliloquy, instead I have become weary of being susceptible to the follies of love.
With every relationship I grow weaker, each one taking its toll on me, taking the very breath I had once etched in pen by spilling red ink across the ledger rendering it illegible. All my stories have accumulated to ash and to dust and time has weathered them until they became nearly forgotten. Suddenly there is nothing left to write and nothing more to talk about. The world is as numb as it once was when I left it and all along I have just been going through the motions. I’m barely living, simply existing. But this is the day I wake up you see, because even dreamers can’t sleep forever, I suppose, even writers have to lament their woes. An alarm goes off in my mental clock and it pulls me back to this world. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Just in time to get back to the present to answer the aforementioned question.
“Why did I stop writing?”
The truth escaped me. I tried to answer with a befuddled look upon my face, yet all I could do was glance downward into a pseudo abyss, scrape the ball of my foot against the ground and shake my head sighing, hoping my sense of agony wasn’t something I revealed in responding to the question.
“Yeah, that was a long time ago. A lifetime ago. You know these things, sometimes people go through a phase, I guess it’s all in the past now.”
I folded. Imagine that. All those words I poured out into this world, ocean deep from the sea, currently dried up like mining for salt and spread across this old severed heart of mine. What a disservice to double back on them like that and say it was all a phase. I was living a lie.
“What a shame”
They replied. As if better luck next time, better luck tomorrow. I dismissed this transaction and I carried on until I got home and I argued alone amongst myself maddeningly searching for my prose as if I had lost it somewhere in a bet with my conscience down the gutter in the clutter of my scatter brained thoughts.
If I had really quit writing cold turkey then what are we reading right here? A temporary lapse in judgement? An inkling of what very well could be the start of a new story? Maybe, just maybe, but let’s not kid ourselves. I wouldn’t get my hopes up just yet. I’ve led you on toward roads that have led to nowhere before, because even though as the saying goes, “all roads lead to Rome,” let’s not forget that as great as Rome once was, it has fallen.
Its dynasty is no more.
“Et tu Brute?”
You might be sitting there asking yourself, why should this new story be any different from Kevin’s last? Hasn’t he peddled the same old tirade before? Isn’t everything just derivative of “Chronicles of Blondie” and “Confessions of a Caterer.” Am I trying to put lipstick on a pig with all this insubstantial drivel. I can’t argue with you there. I haven’t changed, this is more of the same because I can never guarantee anything more than whatever the hell this life has left to offer through my own cynic’s perspective lens. Take it or leave it, this is the story you’re getting, like it or not, this is who I am. Consider this part of the last piece in my Trilogy of Missed Opportunities.
Lately, I find it difficult to write, to own up to emotions that I should have left for dead like how most of my exes left me. Maybe I thought I could just walk away from all those stories and abandon them much like how countless dead beat dads could just go out to get a pack of smokes and end up leaving for good, never having to return. Sometimes I wish I could disown my own words that easily. Because my thoughts have often betrayed me, so I choose to consume them, until they are at the pit of my stomach boiling over ulcering, becoming as malignant as a cancer, stage 4: rendering chemo obsolete. There’s no turning back now.
I thought I could forget what my words had once tasted like going down. They were so easy to swallow like jagged little pills of ecstasy. Except instead of euphoria they sat in the pit of my stomach laced with regret for the fact that I had written something so incredibly personal and sent it out into the world. It was like giving away my location to the enemy inside of me, letting my inner demons tear me apart from within. Therefore I made sure that my words could no longer reach the light of day. Buried six feet under, I let countless words fall by the wayside, a verbal genocide of syllable seppuku muffled under my breath, stifled under my pen conveniently out of ink. I refused to let my thoughts come up for air. Because they no longer served any point or purpose, neither rhyme nor reason. So I quelled their rebellion. The war of the words was over. The time for silence had begun.
There was a time I used to write stories and anecdotes about my superfluous relationship failures and conquests, typed chapters of memoirs chronicling stories that never seemed to add up to much of anything or much ado about nothing. Lately, however I’ve been realizing more and more that fewer people couldn’t care less about my stories. So I abandoned them like the dreams I once held in my adolescence, growing up to this mad, mad world alone, taking up a vow of silence. Instead I chose to take on three jobs, rather than face a new relationship, rather than face the bigger problem, which was myself. I decided to sacrifice my social life to slave away at work, putting up all these walls within my own Fortress of Solitude just so no one could come in to destroy me, to poison the watering hole. I wasn’t going to let anyone peek at just how vulnerable my heart had become. I had locked it all up until I was numb. Then I was done, or so I had thought.
I kept telling myself that I couldn’t live up to my standard of storytelling, relinquishing my very own words in regret. I bit my tongue, swallowing metaphorical cyanide capsules until I was dead inside, and I forgot what prose had once tasted like. More importantly, I forgot what she had once tasted like. What the world had once felt like to be alive. Recalling when the sun had set across the nape of her neck for the last time with my own eyes, to remembering how calming it once was to have the warmth of her presence felt across the other side of the bed, until she left a life-sized hole in this heart that beats and sleeps forever alone. Who is she? You might ask. She is no one. She is a myth I made up, she doesn’t exist, not to me anyway. Not anymore.
Alas, I still remember when my stories would resonate. They were more than mere memories conveyed onto spilled ink. They were akin to the way artists would brush stroke their way from canvas and into the brilliance of their craft. With every word I tried to grapple how to make you see it the way my eyes had experienced it, to feel it the way I had once felt it, even if I couldn’t express it since the language conveyed could only fall short of living in the moment. Now instead, I bury it six feet under. I became the undertaker of stories, an embalmer of elocution, but even the grim reaper has skeletons in his closet that he fears will escape their confines to find the light of day. This is me airing out said proverbial closet.
Winter came and went and there were days where I was so bitter about this world, that it numbed the inside of my mouth and scalded my tongue like ingesting scalding hot black burnt coffee, so calloused and hardened like kidney stones, hard to push out, but harder still to talk about. Not anymore. After all the stories the world forgot leading up to nowhere in particular, there must be another. There has to be one more chapter left in me that doesn’t end the way everything else in this world has. That doesn’t end with me just waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night alone. There is a solitary voice still inside of me begging you to pull me out of the darkness because I am suffering. It is screaming,
“There has to be more.
This can’t be the end.
Don’t let this be the death of me.”
Chapter 2:
The soundtrack of my life is often composed of morose, sad, and somber love songs that cast a shadow leaving the day feeling sullen. Think of a remix between Toni Braxton singing “It’s another sad love song, racking my brain like crazy” accompanied by Simon & Garfunkel welcoming, “Hello Darkness, my old friend.” Constantly waking up to the sound of silence. Yet today was different. From a distance she stood out, and the orchestra played a different melody to a more upbeat tune. She walked right into my life, into this story with a musical sequence theme song entrance of Hall and Oates playing “You Make My Dreams Come True” and me as Joseph Gordon Levitt dancing a number straight from a scene in 500 Days of Summer. “What I want, you’ve got, and it might be hard to handle, but the flame that burns the candle, the candle feeds the flame.” This was just the beginning and we haven’t even hit the chorus yet.
For the first time in a metaphorical minute, I caught feelings. God dammit like Lionel Richie singing,
“Stuck on you. I’ve got this feeling down deep in my soul, that I just can’t lose.”
Guess, I’ll be on my way. But wait, we change the tune now to
“There she was just a walking down the street,
singing ‘Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do.
She looked good,
she looked fine,
and I nearly lost my mind.”
She was a muse implanting every single love song from A to Z ever sung into my mainframe and if this was heaven, I knew I couldn’t stay. I didn’t belong in this place so I fell across the planets, past the stars, and ricocheted around the moon, and back just to fall back down to earth so hard I left a Kevin sized hole in the atmosphere. Crashing onto the pavement, bent and beat up, but not entirely broken, yet I still managed to wind up in front of this angel.
But wait, our build up needs more story. Let me back peddle a little to give you background into our first encounter. You see, I work at a hospital in the department of Food and Nutrition Services. Now if you ask me that department is a lackluster scene of dating. A majority of the people I work with are pretty damn near old, on the cusp of retiring. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing from a working standpoint, but from a me trying to spit game and flirt around, it puts a damper on my social scene. This does mean, however, if ever I would be inclined to date someone, my department is not even a considered option, but there is still a few choice groups of women I can approach that exist at this particular hospital.
It appears everyone who works at the hospital got their job from being related to someone or knowing somebody who knows somebody already working there. How do you think I got this job? This means that nepotism and favoritism run rampant and flirting with the wrong people who’ve been there for years would probably spread through the rumor mill like a crazy brush fire that could barely be contained. But there is one pool of women of untapped potential that I can invest some time on, and it’s due to the way the hospital is set up as a training facility, meaning there is a lot of foot traffic of younger students in either the field of nursing, activity therapy, or pharmacy.
The nursing students are the most difficult to approach because they are like wolves. They always travel in packs watching each other’s backs. They are the girls at the club, a well established clique that you can’t single out just one to talk to, because they’re always teamed together, eating, drinking, breathing, focusing, studying, going to the bathroom as one collective unit.
Semper fi.
I mean seriously, nursing students are like an army of one, no one gets left behind. So I try not to tread in their waters, because these sharks can smell blood from miles away, and Homie don’t play that game.
You know what I’m saying?
Activity/recreational therapy students are a mixed bag, while there are fewer of them, they come in and out like a whirlwind, moving around like humming birds, busy bodies, often too occupied with planning and scheduling their lesson plans. It’s difficult to get their heads out of their scheduling books. I have yet to successfully slow one down to talk to for more than five minutes. Lastly we have the pharmacy students. Ladies training in pharmacy have usually captivated me. There is always only 1 or 2 training interns at a time and they are usually very beautiful, demure, soft-spoken Asian girls, and the latest one to walk in certainly hit all those checklists and certainly caught my attention.
Now that we’re caught up let me just explain where words fail to express the way she made me feel the first time I laid eyes upon her. When I saw her it felt like she had pulsated through my bloodstream. It was as if this whole time I had been blind trying to read and write stories on plain flat paper and she comes out of nowhere to put my hand down onto the page to discover that the surface was never flat to begin with, rather there was braille there all along. Suddenly my sensory deprivation had been alleviated and I could sense and feel a whole new world like never before that everyone else had already forgotten about, I was alive and she had awoken me from a thousand years of slumber. She became the literal embodiment of my poetry and it started with something I had forged onto the page:
Often times
I find myself
Betwixt
Between the ridge
That separates
Your eyes,
Lost in the space
Of the divide.
Try as I might,
Find it
Difficult to breathe
Sometimes.
In essence
It is your presence.
Emotions once dormant,
They became sentient.
Asphyxiation
Pulmonary aspiration,
I could feel a
Tightening in my larynx.
Words left
On the bed
Dresser drawers
Where secrets are kept,
Yet, you remain
Transparent.
Waiting to exhale,
Waiting to wake,
Don’t hold your breath.
You’ll find,
Sometimes,
In this life
Or even the next.
Some things
Remain,
Some things
They fade,
But some things
They will never
Change.
I remember it all like it was yesterday. It was a Tuesday, and we were not as the song suggests, blowing up. Tuesdays I make burritos in the cafeteria. Yeah, I know. This is what a year in culinary school has wrought upon my existence. The pinnacle of my achievements. Classy as fuck, isn’t it? I digress. It is what it is. At least I get paid a decent government wage. Well, on this seemingly ordinary day I gazed up after a long stretch of non-stop burrito making action and saw her in the line. To me she was perfect. It was her smile. When it opened up, there was like a little glimpse of heaven in it and the way she looked into your eyes, it felt familiar. It felt like I was at home. The usual noise of the cafeteria was drowned out by one song playing on loop in my mind as I heard Tevin Cambell in the background singing,
“Can we talk for a minute?
Girl, I want to know your name.”
She came closer and closer down the line until it was time for our first impression. It was at this point my body broke down and I had a fucking aneurysm.
“Why?”
You might ask.
Because I forgot for 30 seconds of my stupid fucking existence how to function as a human being. There was a pain in my chest.
A heart attack?
Stroke?
Indigestion?
Acid Reflux?
None of the above.
I think Michael Jackson put it best when he sang,
“You give me butterflies.
Inside, inside and I”
had to find it inside of me to pull myself together, to man up because we would not be here today reading this story if I had just let her get away without at least finding out her name, without trying to advance the story.
It began with 15 seconds of self-doubt to end up with a split second of articulate courage for me to form some composure as I let out a gigantic sigh. Our eyes locked, my world rocked, and it all started with a smile. The playlist changed;
“I’d stop the world
and melt with you.”
“Dream of better lives,
the kind which never hate.”
In a matter of seconds she had me sprung all because of those brown tractor beams of pupils dilating that I wanted to thrive inside of.
“Hi.”
I said.
She smiled and responded with a “hi” back at me. For a moment I was high. I paused for 3 of the longest seconds of my life because I froze and my synapses refused to fire on all cylinders. I couldn’t remember the last time I put myself out there to talk to a beautiful girl I was interested in. My consciousness kicked in and began to jump-start any available neurons.
“How can I help you?”
She looked bewildered. Like a wayward soul I wanted to take home, take care of, spend the rest of my life with, figure out how long forever really lasted. Tamia played in the background,
“If I could just see you every morning
when I open my eyes.”
She replied,
“How does this work?”
I smiled,
“Well, I work in the cafeteria, now you tell me what you do.”
She grins,
“I’m a pharmacy grad student at UCSF.”
I nod,
“Well, pharmacy grad student from UCSF my name is Kevin. Welcome to the hospital. Should I continue to call you Pharmacy grad Student from UCSF or do you come with some sort of name as well?
Seems kind of formal don’t you think?”
She laughs that kind of infectious laughter that could unite our nations.
“Hi Kevin, my name is Steffie.”
I grin,
“So is that like a nickname or…”
She shakes her head and points down at her name badge, which prominently reads
“STEFFIE —”
Then she replies,
“Nope, that’s it–Steffie.”
I give a little chuckle
“Oh, that’s cool Steffie. Cute picture. I see your parents have taken the trouble out of giving you a nickname by in fact naming you with a nickname.”
She laughs,
“Hey, don’t judge. It’s my name all the same.”
I shake my head,
“Well Stef, we just met I couldn’t possibly judge you. At least not before we’ve had a few drinks.”
We share a laugh then she chimes,
“So are you going to tell me how this works or do I have to go somewhere else for lunch?”
I reassure her,
“Aw, don’t leave just yet, this is slowly becoming the highlight of my day. Let me tell you how it works though. You’ve been to Chipotle right?”
She nods
“I have.”
I continue,
“Imagine we are transported from this hospital, and suddenly we’re in Chipotle. Now, stay with me on this, okay.”
She nods in accordance as I continue.
“It’s our first date and I’ve made the unfortunate decision to take you to a Chipotle because, well funds are tight and then I suggested that afterwards we Netflix and chill. Now open your eyes. Here we are I’ve brought Chipotle to you.”
She busts out in this infectious laughter,
“I never closed my eyes to begin with and what kind of lame first date is that anyway?”
The ice was broken,
“I’m trying to set the bar really, really low here, that way date number 2, the sky is the limit. You know Red Lobster, Sunday matinees, the good stuff.”
She mocks,
“You really know how to impress a girl.”
I confidently remark,
“I do what I do. So back to reality. Can I make your burrito now or can I take you out sometime instead? Maybe even both if I play my cards right?”
She smiles,
“Let’s start with the burrito and not get ahead of ourselves.”
I go through all the obvious formalities with Steffie, asking her whether she wanted this or that. How big to make it and how hungry she was. Then I wrapped it all up and that was that.
“Well , did you want me to cut your burrito in half?”
She shakes her head,
“It’s better in tact.
Don’t you think?”
I laughed,
“We just met, but I feel like you’re alluding to something besides consuming burritos.”
She had a mischievous smile on her face,
“Whatever gave you that idea?”
I pounced at the chance to ask her out again,
“I don’t know, but what I do know is you never really answered my first question. Could I take you out sometime?”
Steffie looked abashed,
“Since we just met, let’s take it slow, and let me think about it. Maybe you can ask me that again some other time when we get more acquainted.”
I could have sworn she gave me a wink and a smile and I posed one more question before she left.
“Well, how much time do I have left before I can say that I’m glad we’re acquainted?”
She smiled,
“I graduate in a couple of months.”
That was that. Steffie was off and I watched her walk away, memorizing her figure, remembering the contours of her face, putting away memories of her until another day. The days and the hours and the seconds went by as I counted them waiting patiently every Tuesday just so I could see her face.
Chapter 3:
Something to talk about:
She wasn’t one for small talk
Her eyes begged
Food for thought.
I let words surface
Across pursed lips
In hindrance
Allowing her to digest
Abstract appetizers
Briefly touching the tip of the iceberg.
Peel back the layers of this skin
Revealing monsters and demons
Which can’t possibly be tamed
They can’t be saved
But from the rich
Touch of silk on the skin
Of your lips
As your teeth bite into
The void you sear into them.
And for that brief second
Inside the bones you taste
To have your way
You have won
They become sane.
It hasn’t always been easy for me to approach women. Lately I’ve been caught up in dealing with my own inadequacies, failing upon seizing heavy-hearted missed opportunities. There is an unfortunate hopeless romantic side of me that is under the impression that everything has to be about timing. Thinking, well now is not a good time to ask you out, it has to be perfect, it has to be right. I have to be right, but then again I’ll never fully be right. So I sit and wait and bide my time trying to hold out for that single solitary defining moment for the door to open.
Guess what? The other side, the realist in me already knows the door will remain shut and the moment has already passed the second I hesitated and decided to wait it out. That moment was on the last train, on its last stop of the night. I missed it because I wasn’t quick enough to catch up to it. The time is up and I’m stuck here at the station. It’s closed. The operator has left for the evening, and I have to spend the rest of the night alone, cold, filled with the regrets of the plans I didn’t attempt to make come to fruition. Welcome to my reality.
I suppose I should be old enough to recognize that nothing is perfect, time is wasted, and if I wait too long, procrastinate too much, or even dream so big I’ll somehow over sleep the present. If I don’t learn to carpe the fucking diem, wait for a fate that I failed to take into my own hands, well the door stays closed, a window probably won’t ever open, and opportunities are left forsaken. I wish I could say I keep making the same mistakes so I could learn from them, grow from them, better myself, but it’s worse, much worse than that. I chose to never make any mistakes at all. I fail to take chances, to course correct to a future that is no longer present and that just isn’t living anymore, that’s me existing. I’m not adding anything of worth into this world. It doesn’t make me a better person, doesn’t make me a survivor. On the contrary, I’m a hermit, I am an island, I’m a shadow, a shell of the man I should be and in the end because of my actions or lack thereof I am bitter, I am empty, I am nothing. Forgive me for admitting defeat.
Every new rendition of a muse is supposed to infuse some sort of optimism in me, but lately I’ve been getting diminishing returns. Steffie was supposed to change that aspect of me, well if it wasn’t going to come from her, then somebody has to come in to fill those shoes. That was supposed to be the purpose of writing this story, but all of a sudden I’m not so sure. I guess my original intentions got lost and became obscured by my own demons. I mean does anyone seriously think that one day, I’ll just wake up and finally have a grip on this sunken ship I call my life? Honestly, there’s a reason this is written as an autobiography and not another forlorn third person tale entitled Steffie’s Story. It’s because as a matter of fact it isn’t her story. None of the stories I wrote were from the perspective of the girl, they were always about me and my own selfishness.
Any girl I caught feelings for could get tangled up in a number of these stories to help me fill the rest of these superfluous pages, but the central driving character motivations are of my own. This is life through my eyes and mine alone. I’m the cynic in this story and I have made that abundantly clear if you haven’t already pieced it together. Most importantly, I hate to break it to you right now, but spoiler alert, this story, the next one, and probably even the one after that, hell maybe all of my silly insignificant stories, they don’t come with happy endings. So maybe I should just quit copying and pasting pages from my diary about a life that ends up tragically gravitating towards the same direction: nowhere fast. The reason for that mainly stems from the fact that all these tales begin and end with the weakest element of the narrative, which is putting it bluntly: me. I am the weakest link in the story, and I cannot fix that unfortunately.
Tuesdays came and they went and at least once a week I had the chance to converse and spend the highlight of my work week interacting with Steffie through the course of her internship. As I began to learn more and more about her, my feelings began to blossom exponentially. She would let me pick at her brain, and reveal the intimate facts about her that I wanted to hear. It was like playing the longest game of 20 questions imaginable. I ingested so much about her that she existed in my thoughts, in my actions, in my dreams, in my writings of prose and of poetry. I was so infatuated with the notion of falling for her that it began to put a huge strain onto my heavy heart. The further I fell for Steffie however, the more I began to get the sneaking suspicion that she started finding less and less interest in me.
What an awful feeling to possess. But let’s break that down shall we. Who am I? Did I not tell you in the beginning that I was broken? Do you think one girl, one person, be it my soul mate, be it the one, my muse, could such a person fix the irreparable damage that is me? How could one person come around and change that? Just fix everything that is already broken. It isn’t going to happen.
Wake up.
The dream is over.
This story was never supposed to be a knock you down, sweep you off your feet, whirlwind romance like the fairy tales in the movies. I don’t even go through a character arc. No this is the nitty-gritty reboot of my cinematic universe where everything has to be dark and brooding and there’s no room left for campy comedy. No one said the world was fair, that love wasn’t going to hurt, that unrequited would ever change, that I was going to win her over or be saved from my own cynicism. That isn’t the story we’re getting.
The hourglass trickled down to its final granules of sand and as Steffie’s final week approached, I felt my rejection looming. Steffie put on her best smile. She wore a beige romper that accentuated the highlights in her hair and showed the smooth pale complexion of her skin. She had shapely toned legs that went on for days across a Sahara. One could get lost in a mirage between her oasis. The sun was out in full effect, the birds were chirping, the day was cheerful, but a dark cloud seemed to hover over me as time ticked away its final seconds. I waited and I waited and when I saw her, all the memories I had of her flooded open and came spilling out of me like rivers that could never possibly begin to satiate a thousand years of my thirst for her.
She approached and I spoke,
“The usual for you today Stef?”
She smiled and nodded and again I got caught up in her charms as she spoke in spells that caught me in a trance of her magic.
“You know it’s my last week here.”
I oblige her,
“Congratulations. We should celebrate.”
She brushes me off,
“Well, actually I’m off to travel to Chili for a week with my friend.”
I thought, “but what about me?”
But really, who were we kidding? I was nothing out of the ordinary to her, not even a footnote in her autobiography. I wanted her to break my heart in the most beautiful way possible. I wanted sad poetry, and tragic stories about romance and the inevitable loss of heartache and heart-break, but she refused to give it to me. The reality of it all was what she gave me was far worse than the rejection of words. What she gave me was apathy and that didn’t settle well with psyche.
It is with a word as with an arrow – once let loose and it does not return.
I sealed my fate in words that could not escape imminent death the second they left my lips,
“Well, since I’m a believer in bookends, if you do recall the day I met you I asked you out right here where we stand. Same place, different time, and here we are two roads diverged coming to an end. So since we’ve become acquainted I’m going to ask you once again for the last time. Would you consider entertaining the notion of going out with me?”
She smiles politely, but her eyes soften, then they become as sharp as glass shards ready to break into my bones leaving every single one of them broken.
“I’m sorry Kevin. I just don’t see you that way. I hope you understand.”
Her words burned like acid coming into my ears as I grimaced and sighed in despair,
“I understand.”
But did I? Did I ever truly understand. I was ready to fall in love with this girl, give her the world, but she was a closed book, a locked door. At least to me. I said goodbye to Steffie and as my heart bled out of its chest for the umpteenth time I died a little for what presumably will not be the last time in my life. It is with a heavy heart and a wayward soul left behind where I depart to say this is where it ended. It never really began, but it ended all the same. In one of the few times the story concludes rather anticlimacticly I will leave you with the last poem Steffie left me with to write and with that, I bid you all a good night.
I already know
Once you go
Everything
Will be different.
I will cease
to write
Poetry.
Prose
Will lose
Its priority
My words will
No longer appease
My sanity.
I will be so consumed
In deafening,
Maddening
Silence.
Turn my back to
The sounds of reason,
Lapses in judgment,
I will cease to find any meaning.
I shall remain absent.
All because I
Couldn’t turn
These dreams
Into reality.
Couldn’t make intuition
Come to fruition.
So in to the deep
Blue sea of solidarity
They go.
Drowning in disparity.
I will mourn
A missing muse,
Realize you took
The very best
Pages of my open book
Splitting its narrative
Into two.
What is left
Is gone
What is left
Is done.
Out of my hands,
Slipped through the crevices
Of chances
Not taken,
Instead left forsaken
Lost in the gravity
Of the situation
Lost in the tragedy
Of losing the sensation
Left in the wake
Of mistakes
I failed
To make
Use of my time
Your gone
And I am left behind.
Kevin C is me 