I would not mind leaving this hell for another. Because I could not care less if I throw away my life of failure and inadequacy as long as you were with me.
I was another stranger, another faceless being in the tapestry of your dreams. And you held...
Memories hold bitter truth as much as unbridled joy. To be young and ignorant—I would give all I have to remain so. But that first time at the landing of the fire escape, with the afternoon sunlight streaming against the criss-crossed embossing on the metal floor, with me hunched over my phone with earplugs on, music of the lost generation mixed with the things blasting on the radio mingling into a masterful dissonance, I was both.
Ignorant of the ways of the world? Perhaps. Ignorant of the future which will come without fail? Maybe. Or was it the ignorance of what crept behind me, with a cloud of impudent doom and compulsive regret hanging over your head?
Memories are a bitch. All they tell you are things you wished to have known before, the things you saw but never remembered until it is too late.
The past will tell you of how I watched you climb up the landing, your shoes clacking against the metal steps—ones made from braided steel wires to provide a false safety to anyone who looks down to see the entire campus below. The past will tell you how I looked up for the first time I was here, and how I looked back to see you striding towards me with that lopsided smile on your face. It was like you knew me, and you were not afraid to show it.
"Hi," you said, raising a hand in such an awkward wave I almost laughed. Almost. Memories will tell you I was too busy thinking about why a person of your social status was here. Waving at me. Talking to me. Looking at me. "Thought I'd find you here. I always do."
Which, in retrospect, meant you have always been looking for me. At me. Even though I did not ask you to. Because I did not want to be found.
So, I hunkered back to my backpack on my lap and kept my eyes on the notepad lying open in front me. "You shouldn't be able to see me," I answered. Memories will tell you I found my voice too irritating that I did not realize you had dropped down beside me to peer at my face. No one looks at my face and continues to do so like you did.
"Why not?" I remember you asking. Not to mock me. It had been a genuine question—one brimming with concern. Maybe, as memories would tell me, it had been fake, but at that moment, in my ignorance and my sympathy-deficit youth, it was real.
You were real.
I do not recall what I said. Or if I said anything at all. Memories are funny. They tell you bits and pieces, sometimes leaving the things you do not want to remember. Most often compressing the joys of the past into an eye of a needle.
Memories are such bitches.
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