Rating: Should be okay.
Disclaimer: I only own the Stew Pid stuff.
A/N: This story I wrote after my decision to stop writing immediately after the season finale. The title includes a self-jab that mitigates my breach of self-contract. Again, hope it does something for you.
Threadbare
He imagines her one day sitting at the bar at some Yale alumni cocktail, in a sporty blue dress with her serious blue eyes—Christ, even her eyes dress in school spirit. Maybe she'll still have her hair short or maybe when she's actually older she won't have to try so hard to look it. He imagines she orders her martini dry like her wit. He hears in the exaggerated decibels of the imagination the tinker of metal on glass, wedding ring on martini glass, to be exact, as she picks up the cocktail. He imagines she will have married Dean or someone bearing an uncanny resemblance to Dean with whom she would have had her 2.5 children and her pretty white house. He told her they were meant to be together, but he was right and wrong. He doesn't believe in fate. He believes in non-fate. He believes life fashions a destiny and then makes it impossible to ever meet it. Life always goes in the opposite direction of fate. You live to learn first what things are meant to be and then, with a little more living, that they never will be. Life is very proud and protective about its lack of meaning.
He imagines himself saying those very words aloud to her on a rainy day in their messy apartment. She rolls her eyes and slaps his stomach and says with that smile that gives the joke away, "Life does, too, have a meaning." He cocks his eyebrows expectantly and with a knowing smile indulges, "what?" She looks to her right and he reaches over to his left and hands her the dictionary. She thanks him and begins looking it up until she realizes he has ruined the punch line. Or she has for not remembering where the dictionary was…or being so predictable. He laughs, she pouts, and they kiss, and he hears in the exaggerated decibels of the imagination the sweet silence of the melding whisper of two souls. Meant to be, not to be. He had tried to assure her that he had changed, but what he didn't account for was the possibility that she might have changed, too. There were clues. The hair, the running. He should have known she'd changed. Whether it was college, him, sexual experience, or life itself, she was not the girl he left on the bus on his way from Stars Hollow. He doubted she could even be the girl who wanted to duck out in trenches reporting on wars throughout the world, from Afghanistan to Uganda. There was a time he might have wanted kill her—or kiss her—for her dreaming zeal, that courageous softness with which she faced the hard world. He would have called it foolish and naïve. Who would have thought that now that she was worldly, cynical, and desperately secure behind the ivy walls, he would miss that foolish naïveté that was her bravery and passion? And at last, he who thought he had been schooled in life and not in classrooms, had his report card returned and it turns out he failed that class, too. He was now foolish and naïve. Foolish to believe that life and fate were friends, to believe in Luke's books, to believe that she would go, to believe she would still want him. Where was his cynicism when he needed it?
He imagines her as he drives away from the uncomfortable-because-unfamiliar feeling of heartbreak. He imagines life has answers and one day it will give him some. Not all. If he would allow himself to admit fear he'd have to admit he was afraid of all the answers. Because the answer might be both roads lead to same dunghill. If life has proven one thing, it's that it is always changing. That's why it can't obey fate. Fate is too steady, wants to keep everything crystalline and perfect. Life is all about the imperfect, rolling around in the dirt and waking up different and dirty. Maybe she could have said yes and somewhere in Albuquerque they would have found themselves both changed and incompatible…and miserable. Life always leaves you a maybe, a place to imagine something different was really possible and only just missed by time and choice. Maybe when she's at that cocktail yawning with boredom at her life, she'll think about that night he came and offered her a way out, the night when risk and love, passion, chance, and fate were offered her…and rejected. And maybe she'll wonder if maybe she would have had a better life had she made another choice. That maybe it wouldn't have worked out would not matter because in "maybe" it could. They always have maybe. Maybe is the land of fated lovers. Maybe's just a rest stop, though, he tells himself. Stretch your legs, take a leak, read a cheap magazine. Then you get back on the road. You live and you change until you no longer recognize yourself or your memories. Most importantly, fate no longer recognizes you, and finally leaves you alone.
He imagines her as he drives his car, sitting with her hands in her laps playing with a blue thread. She looks a lot like her. She sighs and finally realizing that the thread is just thread, she lets it fall on the floor and disappears. And he wonders if he's finally free or dead.