Faint vestiges of her visions taunt him. Her careful long curls and determined black eyes dance in his head still, withstanding his twinges of defeated anger. And once in a while, a waft of her scent catches him quietly. Persistent on his ruffled plaids, the smell of her naked skin tangled in his thin sheets. He closes his eyes shut, hoping that when he opens them, these whiffs will just disappear, all just a blind imagination in his weary stupor. His eyes peer open. The scents are gone.
She's not here anymore.
Weeks, months hum past him in a drone; empty and disillusioned. His head searches the whirling images of her at her most cruel, at her most cowardly, at her most unfeeling – he needs to find the vindictiveness to feed his lissome fingers and breeze past the keyboards. Underneath the sweltering Roman sun to the hollow corners of his office room, acid words disguised as bitter truths flow and stall without a bearing. Sentences fall and nothing seems brave enough to fill the lack. He paints the thick blackness of their souls, but he needs more. He needs more to hate her, to forget her. He promises himself that he never wants to see her again and he promises that he doesn't care whom she wakes up with tomorrow morning. But he has promised himself many things in the past – never to make her cry, never to question du Musset, always to clasp her hand close in his in those darkened cinema rooms as Andrei Rublev or Hiroshima Mon Amour flashed before them. He promised to always make her happy.
Around his dad, he always wants to appear as the stronger one, someone with more control and heroic love-battered resilience. He thinks his dad has had it rougher, and he decides that his own heartbreak is nothing but a prudent mistake. The lone sight of his dad drinking by himself gently late at night with only the kitchen bulb on pains him, so he hides all the beer bottles lying around in the house. Yet, more often than he dares to admit, he finds himself writhing in his own drunken trance with an empty bottle or two cluttered next to him. More often than he dares to admit, he wakes up to embarrassing poems written with inebriated imprecision about her and the taste of her laughter in his mouth. And more often than he dares to admit, his mindless poems are written about how much he misses her.
He has placed lingering eyes on unsuspecting girls who casually amble past him as he sips his coffee in a Williamsburg deli. Most of them never notice him. Some of them look his way. Most of them have dominant big eyes. All of them have cascading brown locks.
She'll never be here.
She is there, still and aloof – her eyes rest daintily on a Pollock as she stands in her flagrant pink dress. The same color he last saw her in, in the same color they last touched. From that far distance, he wonders if she's ever looked as lonesome and small as she is in that moment. She's left Manhattan for a Parisian life, whispers say. With Chuck, those whispers say. He numbingly takes a silent step toward her direction, refusing to decimate this surreptitious, distant intimacy that suddenly inundates him. It's been too long, he reasons. As her hand gingerly slides down her left arm - eyes transfixed on the painting - garish memories of her softly, melodiously glide her fingers along the contours of his face awash him. With eyes closed, their clammy skins pressed together under the covers, he would pretend to be adrift in a deep slumber as her thumb unhurriedly, quietly brushed the shape of his lips, learning the protrudes of his cheeks, the sharpness of his jaw. She did it often in the darkest of nights, in those tender moments when she thought he wouldn't know exist. But he did. He always does.
Indulgent thoughts of whether he crosses her mind at all as she studies the anarchic, unrestricted interweaving of paint on the big canvas, selfishly seeps into his attention. She knows too well that this is the kind of art that piques him - he would try to get her to like Mondrian, while she would tug his arm resolutely to see Monet. He wonders if at the small back of her mind, isolated and remote, she thinks that there's a probability that they might meet at this very place, long past their final early summer. He wonders what she will say if she were to turn around, right this instant. What he himself will say. He wonders if she has heard about him and -
"…Chuck."
The Blackberry in her ear, head bows down, her free arm instinctively crosses her body. He doesn't stay to hear the hushed phone conversation and struts straight out the exit.
He's sure he loved her. When she brazenly persuaded him to read her sonnets in Italian – with her face tilting close to his, her hand kneading his thigh, her ebony eyes searching his as he breathed those strange words to her like she understood them - he was sure he loved her. When she lost her breath laughing at his inane jokes and frankness, her eyes squinted and deep dimples carved in her round cheeks – he was sure he loved her. When he felt her tongue underneath him, tasting the sweetness of his skin as their bodies danced and frolicked into each other – he was sure he loved her. And in those times, he was sure she loved him too.
Leaning casually against the kitchen counter, his dad pronounces that he doesn't want Lily back. But he still loves her, he says. It all sounds too simplistic yet the certainty in his dad's voice jolts him. His dad becomes the stronger one between the two of them, someone with more control and heroic love-battered resilience.
I still love her.