Er...this
is a very, very odd piece of writing, brought about by a deeply melancholic
mood while listening to (and perhaps in part caused by) the Barenaked Ladies'
"Arms Wrapped Around Me" (a much more haunting song than the title
suggests) repetitively. And that was
all one sentence. Sometimes I impress
myself with my own skills when it comes to subordinate clauses and use of
parentheses. Sigh. Anyway, it's a bit of a "what-if"
fic, many many years down the road, with everything left maddeningly unsaid,
and if you can't figure out the players...well, maybe I'll tell you later. No copyright infringement intended; I make
no money off this story and write it only for entertainment purposes.
Unreachable
(A Meeting in Grey)
They met outside, someplace anonymous,
grey clouds overhead and dead-looking trees in the distance. They nodded an uncomfortable hello to each
other.
"It's been a while," one
man said.
"Maybe not long enough,"
the other answered neutrally.
"Do you really think
that?"
The other man's face was too old,
haggard, lines drawn deep that hadn't been there when the first man knew
him. "I don't know. I'm sorry."
"So'm I."
The silence stretched out in front
of them. They had nothing to say to
each other. It almost broke the other
man's heart to realize that.
"It ended badly," he said,
because they had to talk about something, and the only thing available to them
was the past and its mistakes.
"I know, I was there," the
first man answered without sarcasm. He
held his gaze on the other man, neither compassionate nor accusing. "It shoulda gone down better."
"Yeah, but nothing works out
the way we plan, does it?"
"Never did."
The other man shook his head slowly,
staring off into the vacant distance, hands shoved deep into his pockets to
protect them. "I always screw
things up."
"Nah, man, it wasn't entirely
your fault. It was all of us. We all screwed up."
"But I started it."
The first man sighed. "We ain't children anymore."
"We never were. It didn't stop us acting like it."
"D'you ever think of us?"
the first man changed the subject smoothly, knowing it would do neither of them
any good to go over the other subject.
The second man released a pent-up
breath, letting go of something painful.
"All the time."
His companion reached out to touch
the other man's arm, thought better of it, hesitated. His hand dropped uselessly to his side. "We think of you, too," he stated sadly.
"Once the screw-up failure,
always the screw-up failure." The
words were bitter.
"Not true." The first man's voice was firm, faith etched
deep in his words, in his eyes, in his soul.
The other man wished he could believe him.
"I wish--" He stopped, looked confused, and gave up in
defeat, finishing the sentence quietly after a moment. "I wish I could change the past. Make things right."
The first man glanced at him
shrewdly. "You've been wanting to
do that ever since I met you."
The other man shrugged. "Maybe."
The first man shrugged back in
perfect imitation. "You make
choices. You live with them."
A confusion of feelings welled up in
the second man, and he turned to stare blindly at the first, needing
reassurance or comfort or a chance to unburden himself--something, the first
man wasn't sure, couldn't know. He
didn't know this other man anymore.
"But did I make--"
"No." The first man raised a hand, stilling the
other one's words. "Don't ask
yourself that. Or me. It's not worth it."
The other man nodded, crushed. "I have to go now. You understand. I have to keep going."
"I know."
He stared into the first man's eyes,
desperate to find some trace of recognition, friendship, a bond he was
uncertain he'd wrongly severed.
"I'm sorry, my friend," he said.
The first man held his gaze
impassively. "I know," he
repeated.
The other man held out his hand,
hesitated, nodded to himself in resignation, dropped the hand unshaken, and
walked away.
The first man silently watched him
go.
