[ON HOLD] LOVE ME LIKE ART

6

— ZACHARY "ZEUS"
A. CHOI 🙂‍↔️

HAUNTINGLY, I NOW sit alone.

It feels like a ramshackle house that's been abandoned after the police raid. Land that used to be this hub of activity, now deserted. An island without life, now that Imani's whisper isn't surging all the way from Tottenham.

I glare at the bar stool, the cushion no longer bears her imprint. It is almost as if she was never here. The stool besides me is empty but her floral scent is buried here in an almost untimely grave. It is in little, inconsequential moments like this that I miss the nuances of connection.

How a woman's balm clings to my clothes, hours after her departure.

A pallet of her shell-pink blush smearing my collared shirt.

Sometimes, I think that I'm destined for the sidelines, whether this was what I wanted or not. That my own lot is fixed and the diatribe of love isn't in the cards for me. The perils of my job, the immediacy of conflict resolution that comes with it, makes it impossible to find communion because no woman wants to die in those waves.

No woman wants to feel like an option, no less a second or a third.

But Amal and Benna's careers are even more riotous than mine, and yet, they've managed to build, brick by brick. I wish I was privy to the formula, the equation–the rhyme and reason as to how it works or even what works. To the masses, they see me as a connecting bridge, a stop that precedes the final destination because there is no plash of damage that comes from me, no trouble that might incentivise their hearts to commit.

I'm too safe.

Too intentional.

And ultimately, too boring.

My mum doesn't like when I talk like I'm a man resigned to a forlorn reality because it's easy for misspoken words to manifest.

But, the scores of it working for me are one and nil.

I take a pensive sip of my drink, as I wait on Benna.

"Ah." Willy observes the empty barstool next to me, almost as if my state of mind are a bunch of flowers he can still smell. "Where did trouble go?" He asks, in his East End twang underscored by the rhythmic clinking of beer glasses in the hook of his right arm.

"Imani?"

"Pretty thing didn't tell me her name." Willy reveals, a rare note of admiration clotted in his tone. "But she had the kinda face a geez won't ever forget." For a moment, his typical gruff features soften– and the reality dawns that it isn't just mine whose shit she's shaken. He moves around the bar, "But yea, where she go?"

"Said she needed to go." I say, burying my forearm into my suit jacket.

"You look disappointed, mate." Willy observes and I sing like a canary.

"I am, a little." I admit, "I liked talking to her, since you know..." My words trail but the truth is still bitter. I skim the crumbled note paper that is dressed in her scribbled digits.

"I get it, cheese." Willy's voice is tinged with rough-edged sympathy that can only fall out of the lips of someone who has seen and heard it all. "You were with Madi for a helluva long time, it's 'bout time you shake off that ghost, geez you've been holding onto. Pretty thing said she likes our corner of the city so–"

I bring the notepaper into view and wave it slightly.

"Oh, aye." The clogs in his own mind turn. "You called her, geez?"