A Chance Encounter

I wasn't supposed to run into him again. In fact, he was supposed to be on the other side of the world but that's the funny thing about life, it enjoys screwing with the people who already got screwed over a thousand times before.

It was a Tuesday afternoon and I was listening to "Heat Of The Moment" by Asia. The classics will always stay classics. Anyway so it was a Tuesday and I was headed to the art store to pick up a new acrylic paint set that I had my eye on. It was once I was on the subway that he came up to me, eyebrows drawn together and lips pouted ever so slightly. His expression is pretty understandable, considering what happened last time we saw each other.

I knew he had looked familiar when I got on the car, but it was his voice that cinched the deal.

It still had that gravelly and rough, yet soft and kind tone with the faintest southern twang to it that makes a person want to be afraid of him and still hang on every word he says. It was with this enigma of a voice that he approached me with. "I'm so sorry to bother you, but you look like the spitting image of my best friend when I was a child. You wouldn't happen to know her at all? Her name was Cassandra Altan."

I didn't trust my voice, one because he would instantly recognize me and two because my words would have completely failed me. So instead, I shook my head and did a few ALS words spelling "I have no idea who you're talking about. You've got me confused with the wrong person." I was hoping that would do the trick, that the language barrier would cause him to lose interest. But luck wasn't with me that day as he sat next to me and started to have tears in his eyes.

"You look so much like her," he whispered, his voice cracking ever so slightly on the last word. Despite his eyes watering up, his lips stretched into a sincere, happy grin that made the deep wrinkles around his eyes much more pronounced. I thought it made him look wiser, but I was more worried about the fact that we had been drawing the small crowd's attention. If there's anything I didn't and still don't need is attention.

Just then the doors had opened and I was about to sign that it was my stop and jump off, but he grabbed my arm, and asked me to stay. I would have said no had he not looked at me with those stormy ocean eyes of his, his gaze completely unaffected by age. The same eyes that got me in heaps of trouble, the eyes that once held mischief and pranks gone so horribly wrong they went right. The same eyes that I could never say 'no' to despite my continual disapproval. The eyes that I still, decades later, couldn't say no to.

So I stayed. And I listened as he recounted stories of our long lost childhood. He laughed that big laugh when he told me of the weekend we spent camped in the woods without telling anyone. He smiled that small smirk when he wove the tale of how he and I had stolen my mother's jeep to watch the stars fifty miles outside of town. I didn't say anything–couldn't say anything as my entire past that I had tried to bury came back up again.

His hand never left my arm, though his eyes had faded quickly into the fantastical memories we had shared, each one seeming to pull him further and further from the subway we had been sitting on for the past two hours. And then, as if it had just occurred to him, he turned to me and whispered, "You couldn't be my Cas, she died almost sixty years ago."

As if those words were the last crack in the dam, his tears started flowing freely while his chest started heaving up and down faster and faster, his face draining of all blood and his pupils were blown out to the point that they almost took up his entire irises. Thankfully, with whatever luck I had left, the last people in the car had gotten off a stop before.

And then came the babbling. His words came heavy and fast in breathless bursts that almost seemed to have no end. It wasn't until I listened closely that I understood that he was recounting the events of the night we last saw each other. The night I was supposed to have died. The night I wish I had died instead of clinging to life like the idiot I was back then.

I sat there for what felt like an eternity with him, reliving a night of shadows and blood, of screams and silence, of the stars winking out one by one until they were blinding me in full force again. A night filled with a monster's nightmares and a demon's worst fears. But then, at the end came the part that I dreaded. The moment of pause. Where the wind had stilled, the grass frozen in time as he picked up my lifeless body still warm from his blood. My broken bones and collapsed organs crushing even more as he clutched me close and screamed again, breaking the spell of stillness. On some level I knew it had to have happened, but I didn't live it. I didn't want to. But he did. He lived it and he remembers and he was crying in my arms on that train, sobbing into my chest for the girl he lost so long ago.

Then, he stilled. Straightened up, wiped his eyes and smiled his signature smirk, mischief dancing in his eyes as he asked, "Hey Cas, why are you crying?"

Quietly I wiped my own tears, stood up and shot back, "'Cause I had to look at your face for more than a second." He laughed that warm laugh as his hand found my outstretched one and exited with me on the next stop. Slowly we had wove our way through the busy city streets before finding a nursing home in the high class area.

"Hello! My name is Cassandra and I want to admit my father, Kevin Maybelle."