One Last Time

One Last Time

This is a piece of writing that I am entering in DarknessAndLight's contest, hope you enjoy!

Bold is DarknessAndLight's work!

His eyes first connected with hers over the dim lights of the cafe. She smiled slightly, and bent her head down, hair covering her face so he couldn't see the blush forming. It was then, he had enough courage to talk to her. A stranger. Someone he hadn't seen before.

He got up, walked on wobbly legs to talk to her. Nobody knows why. Plonked himself on the chair just as his knees gave out.

He talked to her. She was shy at first, but as they got talking, he could see her excitement grow with each sentence. She was talking quickly, trying to get the sentence out before she could forget, arms flailing to help show what she was meaning. He was enthralled.

He asked if he could walk her home. She agreed, she thought of him as a friend.

They started hanging out more often. Days turned into weeks, turned into months. Photos accumulated, piling up one after the other. Hung on the walls of each of their houses. Her parents disagreed with this boy. He wouldn't help her focus on her studies. She didn't think of him like they did. She liked him. Love, so far, was too strong of a word. They were only sixteen.

She started feeling a deeper form of affection towards him. After a few months, he asked her to be his girlfriend. She accepted, of course, but this made her parents dislike him even more. Her parents formed a plan.

He told her he loved her, and a few years later, when they were twenty one, he asked her father if he could have his daughters hand in marriage. The father declined in the worst possible way, but the man, as he could be called now, proposed to her anyway.

Knowing he wouldn't have the right taste in rings, he asked her best friend if she would help choose out the best one. They went to the jewelers together. The woman's parents had him followed. A private detective took photos of him shopping at the jewelers with her best friend. The friend was so elated that the couple were getting married, and him, of the choice of ring, that they hugged and kissed each other on the cheek. These photos were the ones that the woman saw. They devastated her. She yelled at him, and the argument lasted for almost a week. She never got to see the ring.

She screamed at him in anger, and said the worst words that he thought he could ever hear from her, 'I never loved you' and she stormed out of his life forever. He cried in his sleep for months.

Her parents arranged a marriage for her with a suitable man, as they thought. She didn't love him as strongly as she did with the first man, but her affection towards him grew, until it could almost be described as love. But not quite.

All that was left of it was a picture-tucked away in the corner of one of her drawers, hidden underneath a box, covered by old linens. It wasn't even in good condition. The corners were chipped, the ink was fading and there was a long scratch that ran from on side to the other, connecting them, like a line between two dots, engraved deeply into the paper cutting the man in half.

Man. Man might not have been the right word, but boy wasn't either, the same way she hadn't exactly been a woman back then and hadn't been a girl either. It was during that time in between where nothing was sure but everything was possible.

Nobody knew about the picture. Not her five children, not her nine grandchildren and certainly not her husband.This was all that was left and it hurt to think it had to be hidden clandestinely this way.

Oh, there were pictures of him elsewhere, in their house. He was on many walls. He was even in her bedroom. But he wasn't hers on those pictures the way he was on the one tucked in the drawer. It was in his eyes, he had said, and even after all these years, after everything, she still believed him.

That picture was all that was left, yes, and it was hidden, but it was better like this. Because she didn't, couldn't share this with anyone else, share this part of him, this small reminder. That was all she had left. On that picture, he was hers, and strangely enough, she was his too.

End