The Love I Couldn't Keep

2. Elizabeth

Elizabeth was the mysterious woman who sat at the back of the morning train, her face obscured by a book. And it was the same book every day, which puzzled me then and puzzles me still. She always seemed to be thinking, the gears in her mind always turning and whirring. She looked like she held all of the world's knowledge in her head, and I wanted to know it all. I wanted to know the secrets of the universe that she held with her. Everyday I would take a small peek at her figure hovering over her book. One particular day, I sat next to her and asked for her name. Elizabeth. It sounded smart when she said it. I asked her what she was reading and she told me the Catcher in the Rye. An intellectual book for an intellectual girl.
After that day I couldn't get the image of her soft lips saying her name out of my head. I couldn't stop thinking about the way she would crinkle her nose in order to move her glasses farther up her nose, or the way she would lick her slender finger before she turned the page. She didn't tell me much, but what she did, I replayed over and over. Hanging on to every word. I was falling so fast I didn't even realize I was falling. I didn't realize that I was falling in love with Elizabeth whom I could only glance at for forty-five minutes while on the train.
Maybe it was her persona that grabbed me and didn't let me go. Or maybe it was the conversation we had that made me feel that she let me into her small world of turning pages and small smiles and laughs.
I was so caught up in the secretive enigma that was Elizabeth that I didn't even notice when she sat down in her usual seat on the train with a sparkling ring on her finger.

Elizabeth taught me that it takes more than shared glances on a train and fulfilling conversations to fall in love with someone you were never meant to have.