it's pretty hard to find"
- "Mother of Pearl," Roxy Music
“You should run away and just come here. Be with me.” The words were standard fare for her and, really, she did know logically that she was kidding around. Still, the more she said it, the more she actually pictured it.
“I wish,” he said – the softness in his voice seemed so against his character. She loved him that way.
Love is a tricky thing, you see.
Everyone talks about that ideal love.
The love where you only want their happiness. And that happiness makes you happy.
That kind of selfless love that everyone seems to think is supposed to be default. Everyone begins with “if you really loved him...” when complications happen, or when love strikes unrequited, tearing out a piece of our hearts. Everyone expects that the high road is really on level ground with all other options, and that it only takes one small extra step.
Ideal never quite equals real, however.
Everyone wants the one they love to be happy, but they want to be the source of that happiness. It is the selfish way of being selfless, and the desire to provide true meaning and love to another.
It is also what most people find themselves trapped with.
Sometimes she found herself trying to blur the lines between the two. Justifying why it could work both ways. She was looking for her happy ending and – though sometimes it seemed more a pleasant daydream than any sort of plausible reality – she felt she was getting closer and closer to it every day. She had grown older, and matured. So much about her had changed. But nothing about her feelings for him had.
There was meaning in that, and she wanted to make sure that meaning wouldn’t go to waste.
Some how. Somehow she would find a way.
She wondered what it would be like. She wondered how it would feel to step on to the train, meeting him downtown. They would walk along Granville, with uncharacteristic sunshine lighting the sidewalk, holding hands like they had wanted to do for years.
Breakfast at a French café and a detailed search through any comic book shops they came across. With their luck, rain would break out after they left, but she would have her girlish polka-dotted umbrella, and they could make it work between the two of them.
She wondered how it would feel to love him there. Next to her. Within reach.
She wondered how it would feel for them to be normal.
Instead, there she was, rolling over on her bed, facing the computer screen. He was quiet on the other end, but it was okay. There were times when just having him there – or “there,” really – meant just as much as having a conversation. It was the feeling of his presence and the awareness of his existence in the same space as hers that filled her heart and made her believe that it could really be okay in the end. She heard him typing, being, existing, and she smiled tiredly.
“I love you.”
(I really do)
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