A/N: I do not even know where this came from, but I hope you like it!
Ophelia pours coffee into too-small cups, eight hours a day. Aprons napkins nickels. After a few months, everyone sounds the same.
Ophelia dreams.
There was a river she loved, a green-gold sliver through the old farmland. And maybe someday, they'll go back. Father and brother and her.
Ophelia dreams.
.
For a moment, when she first sees him, she wonders if he is real. He is dangerous because he is beautiful, and he hurts her because he is in pain.
(She never knows why he chooses to talk to the girl with flowers in her hair).
.
Law student. Visionary. A man who holds a gun to his temple and pulls the trigger at someone else.
What kind of name is Ophelia? he teases her one day, all edge and smile.
And very, very timidly, she returns, What kind of name is Hamlet?
It's the only time she sees him bewildered. Mine, he says, as though he has already forgotten his own question.
(As though he has already forgotten her).
.
They kiss. She loves. He leaves.
And even though he's the one with the cigarette clenched between his teeth, she's the one left with ashes on her lips.
.
He has friends. He does not trust them, and so they become untrustworthy. He wields his sorrow like a weapon, and she never learns to dodge the blows.
She doesn't have to be told the story to put the pieces together. Something about betrayal. She watches him in the corner of the café, typing notes frantically, eyes dark and intent, and thinks, I know. I could tell you all about it if you asked.
(He never asks).
.
They kiss. His kisses are hungry, and she cries afterwards, because she knows she'll never be enough for him.
(No one ever tells her she doesn't have to be).
.
Hope is a funny thing. Ophelia scrubs down the counters and locks up at night, thinks how the shadows remind her of him. Hamlet and his ghosts.
Ophelia hopes.
.
Maybe he's drunk, maybe he isn't. But something is changed—his mission comes into focus, as his life goes all to hell. He comes in a Tuesday. She calls his name and he looks at her without recognition.
Without interest, or memory—
He is no longer hers.
(He never really was. That was the hope, and the dream, and it was nothing).
.
Ophelia hangs up her apron, wonders why her hands aren't shaking.
And all she can think is,
There was a river—