Mostly fictional story inspired by little factual moments and non-fictional emotion

As soon as I see him, I recognize him.  I have never seen this woman, but I have seen him.  I have studied him and been affected by him and written stories in my mind about him.  I lose my breath a little, as he and this lady climb into our shared taxi.  He opens the door for her, and she, in her dated, flowered dress, slides across the bench seat next to the driver.  He climbs in behind her, striking in his presence, and leans toward the window as the car pulls away, fanning himself in a signal to this lady that he is hot.  She smiles and nods, and readjusts the top of her dress, stuck to her doughy skin with the sweat of summer.  I notice how pale she remains, even in the thick of strong summer sun.  I know this man, who knows many women, but he does not know me.  As we drive east toward Old Havana, I think of nothing but that night I first saw him.

My husband, who sits next to me now in this hot, shared car, had taken me to a newly renovated restaurant in Vedado.  Ten, maybe twelve couples scattered around at tables, a few bigger groups of families or friends.  Not empty, not full.  The couples ranged wide in age, but clustered around sufficient levels of attractiveness – no one standing out one way or the other.  Everyone either together local or together tourist, but no couples mixed in that capacity or in age even if otherwise in race.  The wait staff attentive and alert and buttoned up; a mime going around surprising people quietly, though without any spectacular talent.  Music played lightly accompanied by videos on the few television screen, masking a small volume of chatter and allowing any two people not to talk if they had nothing to say.  A scene anyone could hide and fold into.  They came in, this man and another woman, intertwined, commanding attention without asking for it. She entered first – he had opened the door for her with his right hand, keeping his left hand tightly squeezed around her right hand as it trailed behind her back.   He followed her in, their hands repositioning to intertwined fingers as he regained his steps to be by her side.  She reached across herself and touched the bottom part of his left bicep with her left hand, slid that hand down to the inside of his elbow, leaning into him. The shift of her weight to the right, against him, was barely visible, but the power of the layered touch evident – visible energy created simply by her white hand on his brown arm, their contrasting fingers interlaced two feet below that grasp, her red nails appearing like brushes of passion clustered by his elbow and his palm.

I felt conspicuous, my eyes glued to the them.  My gaze must have been a magnet, guiding the waiter to sit them at the table right in front of my husband and me. Opposite energies attracting – when was the last time my husband held my hand rather than just let his fingers wrap around mine with no greater purpose?  He pulled her chair out for her, but as she took her purse off her shoulder and thanked him they both got stuck within a gaze and paused before sitting. All tangled up in smiles, they escaped the tangle with a kiss, straight into each other, strong. As their faces regained distance I saw their lips revived with moisture from the other.  Shifting my eyes away from their wet lips, I noticed the details of these two.  His height, dark skin, bright eyes, big hair shooting evenly in all directions; his strong and lean physique.  Him, making a simple gray t-shirt with some blue writing look tailored for him.  Her tan skin, blond hair pushed behind one ear, inviting eyes, flawless legs by Cuban standards; her, not quite as tall as she carried herself.  Her, unselfconsciously letting the white dress she wore show off a strong but curvy body. He grabbed her hand again as they sat down.  As I imagined him squeezing her fingers, the corners of her mouth lifted toward the moon, both their eyes radiating beauty.  Were their eyes that beautiful separate from each other, or was it the beams of light traveling between them that made them so? What were they pulling out of each other? I glanced at my husband, to see if he saw this light, but he was looking at his coffee cup, tapping the end of his spoon against the table lightly, humming a tune I didn’t recognize, letting a thought wander through his mind that I could not grab – did not want to grab, if truth be told.

However kind his words to her were – the ones he said lightly, causing her to blush; the ones that pulled her closer to him, making her lean in seductively with a smile – they were modest compared to his actions. He held her hand, grabbed her thigh.  He gave her bites of his food, brushed her hair behind her ear, smiled when her eyes asked for it and even when they didn’t. He gave her a napkin, moved her drink, shared his, anticipated her needs. The length of time each held the floor during their conversation told me their discussion was of something substantial, though it didn’t darken their eyes.  Their light filled the room but only could be captured by each half of this whole. I wanted a hint of what it would feel like to bask in this light, but without a way in, I could only imagine. Their words remained undecipherable, but I eventually heard their laughs – his full of extra air filling the space between sounds, hers quick and instinctual.  The punctuation of their laughter told me he was local and she foreign. You see this here, not frequently but not rarely. Their ease of energy was what echoed uncommon to my third eye.  I was certain they knew each other well before this dinner, this day, this week, this month. Knowing how hard it would be for him to visit her and return to Havana – the money that would need to be saved, the time off work, the logistics of travel and reentry, particularly if she was American, one of our new tourists – I knew they didn’t meet on her soil.

No one at that paladar would see this exchange of light between my husband and me.  We don’t have it and I’ve thought before I saw this couple, and while I watched them, and endlessly since then, why not?  What don’t we have? We have history, but it is just accumulated through companionship, piled on top of our own respective souls.  But these two, here in front of me, they have moments (even if, so far, fewer) piled on top of some sharp electricity trying to find its way to the other person.  They have layers and layers shaped by some core ache for the other. The mutual ache pulls something out of the other and devours it, in front of our eyes. I sat there, envious, knowing I was seeing something different than I had, something I wanted.  How at home they were with each other here in the midst of a newly renovated Cuban restaurant told me how homesick they felt for each other between the time they met and each reunion. That I wasn’t recently familiar with this ache of homesickness had little to do with my lack of travels.

As I watched them eat and touch each other and share their drinks, their eyes limiting each other’s subjects, I created their first moments in my mind. He was supposed to model at The Palace’s runway show, still going long after its height of popularity, when it once commanded 15 CUCs – near a whole month’s government salary – just for nightly cover, still a draw for the beautiful and artistic in Havana, still a way to make extra CUCs for those with his cheekbones.  The rain, as heavy then as the downpours we had this week, stopped the show that night.  Already there, away from his home in Central Havana and ready to walk the runway, he didn’t want to just go back home. He popped over to Fabrica de Artes Cubano, alone, saying hi to all the other culturally immersed locals who frequent this warehouse turned art mecca any given night it’s open.

He arrived long after the crowd had thickened on the dance floor, but well before there was no room to move.  He saw a group of foreigners talking with a few locals, one of the foreign women with a short black dress and nice legs and innocent smile.  He tried to figure out if any of the local or foreign men with her were her boyfriend.  Her warm smile made it hard to tell, but she shared it without discrimination, making him think none were more special than the next.  The group was standing near the downstairs bar and discrete area celebrating architecture, a little enclave that allowed them to peek into the dense dance area. Wanting to go to the outside bar, they were trapped inside by the same rain.  He said hi to her, introduced himself in his accented English. He stuttered on his words just slightly, and somehow the stutter gave her a better glimpse of his kind soul.  She said hi, introduced herself, smiled, acknowledged that she couldn’t speak Spanish too well.  Her deficit in Spanish skills and her legs made her seem younger than she is; his manners and reserve made him seem older, closing any gap that existed. Their meeting was the lightning that should have accompanied that storm.  And so it began.  This is the opening scene I assign to them.

As I weave my way through the paths their story can take from that start, my husband orders another Cuba Libre and glances around at the other diners.  He points out the mime, moving toward this couple’s table.  The woman is looking at her menu, her hand still resting on the forearm of her lover, whose arms rested on the table, stretched easily toward her, his fingers fidgeting as he contains his desire to grab her hands.  The mime’s face comes between them and he notices but she doesn’t, her eyes busy translating the Spanish dishes into English as her red tipped hands run up and down his forearm like a route she navigates daily and can navigate blind.  As she weighs her decision, she bites the side of her lip, plays with the necklace that rests right between her collar bones with her left hand.  He keeps his eyes on her, a gaze heavy with adoration. Do all couples have that at some point in time, that longing combined with reverence when you spot the person you want simply caught up in the task of being themselves? His adoration shot from his eyes and made her passion brushed fingers squeeze his forearm, but did not make her break the concentration required to read the menu in a language she was still learning. The mime patiently waited for her attention, but he was not so patient, finally grabbing her hand in an effort to get her head to turn.  When she looked up at him it was the mime’s face in between hers and his, making her jump with surprise.  Their laughter caused smiles all throughout the room and Havana and Cuba and back to her home that she only missed for the people with whom she shared it.  The light skinned of us, including my husband, blushed at the intimacy hidden in this moment, ripe with an inviting foreshadow.  The mime removed himself with a knowing smile, giving him space to kiss her.  And he did, pulling her to him and tasting her smile and swallowing her laughter and I knew the very first night they met, he kissed her like that, and there had been many nights since.  Their kiss lasted longer than any I’d known for years, right there in the middle of the restaurant with the mime just feet away and the daiquiri and the oversized sangria ignored.  I had to look away knowing the moisture of their parting and smiling lips would make me cry.  I didn’t want my own dry lips to catch the falling tears, knowing they wouldn’t be seen by the man sitting at the table with me.

I distracted my eyes long enough time to take a couple bites of my food, comment on the shrimp in an effort to start a conversation with my husband, receive his nod in return. I turned back, seeing her point out to him the dish she wanted on the menu before the waiter took their order from him.  He ordered her dish first, nodding at her to confirm he got it correct, giving her a chance to change her mind at the last minute, but handling it all as he would even if they spoke the same language.  The waiter stepped away quietly, letting them resume their conversation as he grabs one of her hands resting on the table with both of his. Her look content. His shining eyes gained a pensive look and hers one of concern, her eyebrows raised and squeezed slightly together.  Her beauty shifts from a subtle beauty to one of depth, and I know now for certain she is older than him. The dilemma of decisions he is trying to piece together are familiar to terrain to her.  In weight if not in substance.  I wonder whether, in the days after they met at the Factory, whether that mattered to her, to him – their age difference.  Did they realize how many years reached between them? Did it matter more than the miles of the residence, or the experiences of their ancestors?  Or was it nothing, not even a thought?

Her concern pegged her as a realist who had, somewhere along the way, tamed her romantic heart that, now, was beating. Maybe she had known before meeting him what it feels like to sit in my chair, here, with someone who has nothing to say to her anymore and with whom there was never an ember of electricity upon which to pile moments, someone with whom there wasn’t an ache stretching for light.  Someone with whom you don’t know jealousy, someone who doesn’t generate longing; someone with whom your heart hasn’t needed reshaped in order to carry the weight of emotion. Maybe it wasn’t the age or the miles or the difference in skin pigment that mattered at all that first meeting, those days after.  Maybe it was just that she believed she should enjoy the moment, the rush of feeling, but not hope to extend it to anything more. And he, lucky for her, had no reason to contain his feelings.  His pensive but open expression betrayed his heart, a romantic who hadn’t yet needed to stoke his realism, at least as it relates to women.  Cuban men need to be realistic about many things but not, generally, women.  I see him leaving her Havana apartment the morning after they met, right off the Old Plaza, her body aching with gratefulness at the fun of the night and her mind, void of expectations, reminding herself of the men at home who could easily take his place, but trying to etch his chiseled smile into her long term memory.  I see him running to work, hoping to get off early, realizing half way through the morning that he didn’t take her local phone number.  He gets his day’s work done in half the hours that fill the work day, and at lunch time brushes off the thought of the 2 CUCs – nearly ten percent of his monthly salary – to call her U.S. cell.  “Hello, it’s me. I want, I want to, to see you. I want to take, take you to lunch.”  She pauses only out of surprise, not hesitation.  “Yes, yes, that would be nice.”  “Wait for me, I will be to you in an hour.”  Here, phone conversations are too expensive for anything but logistics.  He runs back to her, not wanting to lose minutes she didn’t think they had.

I sat there, watching them talk, her look of concern holding consistent.  Were they talking about the end of this trip? Or something unrelated to their time together?  I couldn’t tell, I couldn’t hear.  They already must have had a string of hellos and goodbyes – small bookends to nights, to days, to visits.  I daydream about him riding with her toward the airport that first trip, the day she would board a plane and return via a Central American country back to her own; him wanting her to rest her head on his shoulder and her obliging gratefully, him taking in her sweet, distinctive smell; keeping his lips lightly on her soft hair.  When the car pulls over at his stop, shortly before the airport, she swallowed back her tears, knowing that to do otherwise would be unrealistic.  She stood outside the old red Victoria to give him an embrace, one she believed likely final.  “I want to see you again”, I hear him declare softly in her ear.  “I don’t know.  I don’t know how that will happen”, she responds, tentatively.  He didn’t know, either, but cared less about the knowing part than she did.  Daily life here in Havana requires realism and permits – refines, even – romance.  He was good at both.  It was his hands that sent her a note the very next day, not knowing what to do now that they couldn’t hold her, thanking her for all the moments together and reminding her he wanted to see her again.  She read the note and her heart warmed, thinking of all those moments he mentioned without more specifics.  Moments, filled with dancing, with walking in the rain, with his arm around her, with exchanged glances and winks as they won game after game of dominoes, with him showering her with kindness, with him assuming he was invited into her world, with her not protesting, with him rushing to see her at every moment he could.  Maybe there was a moment that she joked about their vacation fling, and he stopped – stopped walking, stopped her, stopped the world –  and told her it wasn’t like that, that he felt more for her.  Maybe, when he said it, her voice responded “But how is that possible?” as her lips were pulled toward the sun despite herself.  At home, a few days went by, and she realized she missed his hands and gaze on her more than she expected, even with the other men giving their hands and their gazes.  Each one is different, they don’t tell you this when you are younger: you can want many and none compensate for the void of the other.  She missed the water he would put by her bedside each night, him watching her do her makeup and proclaiming her beauty when her face most naked, him holding her hand and kissing her unabashedly everywhere they went.  She missed them showering together, dressing together, laughing together. It was a few days after that, still, after he sent her more notes that proclaimed – consistently, repetitiously –  that he wanted to see her again, that she decided to return.  He permitted the romantic in her to be nourished, her heart opened. As I watch their conversation, these short notes run through my mind as if I’m flipping through a book.  After the book of notes, I see an image of their reunion, his convincing successful: Her coming down the stairs from her Havana apartment, opening the door expecting to see him right there but greeted with an empty stoop.  Scanning the street, she hears her name called from the garden café right under and to the left of the stairs.  She looks over, and he is standing tall in the crowd – his hair, his cheekbones, his smile and the red rose he holds for her pulling the corners of her lips and her heart up toward her eyes.  She goes quickly down the stairs, straight to his embrace, so happy she came back. Another hello, so worth the wait.

That night in the paladar, he talked for some time, a monologue to which she intently listened while I wove my version of their story together. He shrugged his shoulders, broad and perfectly strong, sized well to be animated when necessary.  He shrugged again a few seconds later, and I imagined he is talking through a decision with her.  She bites her lip in a show of empathy, indicating that she knows there are no easy answers at this point.  What is he telling her? What is he trying to decide?  She leans in closer to him and puts both hands on his left forearm, then lets one run down toward his wrist and grab his hand again.  I want to lean in closer, to hold someone as well, to feel what it feels like to express yourself through touch.  She says something, thoughtfully, with more volume and projection than she had spoken up to this point.  I can’t understand her English, but I hear her speak fast and then, after a deep breath, slow purposefully down.  It sounds like a song, like an offer, like someone providing clarity.  What is she offering – a solution? An explanation? An option? If I don’t think of gluing my feet to the floor beneath me, I might find myself sitting at their table, trying to piece the story together as I interpret more than just his English for her and her Spanish for him. I glance at a television, see a video of three bandgirls dancing solo next to a famous Salsa band – a video that is twenty years old but still played on repeat here in Havana, where new content is slow to arrive.  So slow that we know how to cherish things for longer than their shelf life might be elsewhere – a handy skill for life.  I glance at my husband, thinking of what to say to this man who I can barely describe to myself any longer, but who sits here with me. Maybe just the sitting here counts for something?  Maybe.  He picks up his Cuba Libre and takes a sip, nods in my direction rather than touching me. He doesn’t know I want him to touch me and I don’t know that I want him to, either.  He says something to me, but his words are covered by an unexpected deep and low laugh from the table I am trying so hard to ignore. My eyes scan back to them, quickly, my husband’s eyes following.

I missed something critical.  This woman in the white dress is not holding the arm of this man in the blue shirt any longer.  She’s sitting up, straight in her chair. Her shoulders poised, but her gaze down at her food, her arms gently by her side, her hands holding the small square of napkin offered.   Her eyes dart around at the air right in front of her rather than at anything in the room, trying to grab tiny particles of courage floating in the air.  At first I imagine she is trying to tell him something more, but then I see a well of water gathering in her right eye.  She dabs at it before any can fall too far.  He is talking again and playing with his food; did he see this moisture that would betray her heart? Or did he think it was just a tear duct clearing out a particle of dust, wiped dry before it reached the slew of freckles half way down her cheek. I dab at my own eyes to be sure it is her crying, and not me.  He asks her something and she waves the hand closest to him in the air, indicating the answer and question can be brushed off. Or, maybe, indicating that she needs a second to be able to speak without tears, I cannot tell. He smiled, gently but cautiously, and put his hand on her knee, and this time it was her own effort that curves her mouth into a smile, not the pull of the moon, and she looked right at him, pained.  Her shoulders stayed poised, though, coaching whatever part of her heart that generated those tears to stop, please, stop.

What made her cry? I suddenly felt protective of her.  Down here, on this trip she was tentative to take, offering him something of herself.  I want to shield her, vulnerable and exposed, even if it is kindness that sits next to her.  I think of distant memories when cold air swept through my lungs and pierced my heart and made me feel hollow and on the verge of crumbling.  Did that cold air just sweep through her chest? Did she lose her breath, stiffen her shoulders to ensure she wouldn’t crumble? I feel this feeling myself, appearing like a storm after pieces of myself I offered were rejected. I project it onto her.  We can gather up courage to offer ourselves to another so rarely in life – maybe before you know better, and then once you know where the lack of courage gets you.  She’s younger than me, maybe fifteen years younger, or maybe just ten or five but with a youthful energy, but she’s already ahead of me, using that latter courage. I don’t want her to crumble.

“You hurt my feelings.”  Is that what I heard? Are those the words I read on her lips? Or were they my own thoughts, finding life in her? I can’t make sense of any other phrase – I don’t know enough English to come up with any other words that fit the cadence of her mouth.  “You hurt my feelings.” She says it again, more quietly.  Her announcement exposed me, and I scan the room to see who else is mesmerized, still, by them.  Others are watching – trying to mask where their eyes are directed but unable.  His hand moved from her knee to her cheek, wiping a newly falling tear with his thumb. She leaned her head against his palm, pushing down so the back of his hand had no choice but to press on her bare shoulder while the palm continued to caress her cheek.  She turned her head toward his hand, kissing the ridge of his thumb that connects down to his wrist.  The pressing of her head to his hand to her shoulder to his thumb to her lips burst with tenderness.  The tear announcing hurt, the tenderness still invited him in – that is courage I have never known.

My mind raced with the question, what hurt her feelings? His laugh must have been the cause, was clearly connected.  That laugh, misinterpreted and wrongly placed. I skip backwards to the beginning I gave them – the rain, The Palace, Fabrica de Artes.  I skip forward again.  He has a chance to model abroad now, on a runway in another country. Maybe France, maybe Italy.  He wonders if it will be good for him and his family – a way to make their life better in a way that can’t be done on government salaries here in our world despite not being able to see them.  He contemplates, with her empathy, what he can do after this three-month stint ends, his current Visa expires? Will he be able to return contently to Cuba, having experienced a bigger world, knowing he has no opportunity to make things better here?  Where can he go to find more opportunity? He suggests to her that he has foreign and relocated friends, encouraging him to come where they are and offering their help, even in her little corner of the world, a mecca of opportunity itself.  This is when she leaned in, grabbed his forearm with both of her hands, ran her fingers down to his wrist, and, sensing maybe that he wanted what she was about to offer – opened herself. “If you want to come to my city, I will always help you.  No matter what happens between us, even if we can’t talk for months or years, even if we aren’t together, if you came, I would help you.  You would always have a place to stay with me, I have plenty of room. I would help however I could.”

For her – a sincere offering she wouldn’t make if she didn’t care about him and one she wouldn’t withdraw, an offer she’d make to any friend, to very few lovers. For him – a reminder of other offers similarly made, then quickly withdrawn once he had set his pride down and asked for such help.  Before she could even finish her words, his deep and low and powerful laugh came out.  The laugh causing her to sit back, reclaim her newly hollow chest, realize the depth of these new feelings there to be hurt and coaching her tears back.  Out here on a limb on this return trip to see him, his laugh told her this magic between them was fleeting, nothing to be taken seriously; that while she might have feelings running deep for him, that depth was not mutual.  Out here on a limb having courted her back and sacrificing all his extra time to be with her; nervous, about to leave this country for the first time, his laugh was his way of taming the embarrassment and disappointment that saturated memories of others offering the same help, never to truly mean it. The memories of those that offered then withdrew, “No, sorry, we can’t help, not now”, a wound recently made and still raw, a wound that her tenderness alone could not negate.

Of course, in that moment, if this is their story, she couldn’t explain why her feelings were hurt and he couldn’t explain why he laughed.  They were at a restaurant, eating pork and fish and beans and yucca and absorbing the admiring eyes of twenty people who longed to have the wires of connection that pulsed through the air from the moment he opened the door for her without letting go of her, and there was a language barrier, after all, even in lust and like and love.  All he could say was “I am sorry, babe”, so softly I couldn’t have heard if I wasn’t holding my breath. She leaned over and kissed him before saying something, just as soft, then kissed him again.  She trusted his apology and he trusted her acceptance of it.  He fixed her dangling earrings and pushed her hair behind her ear again, tapped her gold necklace.  The world was realigned.  He cut a piece of his pork and put it on her plate, she did the same with her fish.  They smiled at each other, their knees were touching.

We paid our bill shortly after.  Reluctantly, I walked out of the restaurant, feeling as if I was leaving a movie half of the way through it. My husband put his hand on the small of my back as he opened the door for me.  I thought of reaching behind me to grab his fingers, hook them into mine.  But I didn’t.  I knew that what I really wanted was another set of fingers to grab, another hand guiding my back. I didn’t want to feel the disappointment of just grabbing his, just feeling skin on skin rather than a current passing through bodies. How unfair to us both.   The rest of the night also unfair.  The cab ride, our bed later, I filled only with thoughts of these two. I sorted through different storylines to their next chapter.  Him, watching her pack her suitcase with melancholy eyes.  Her, looking at her remaining CUCs and realizing how much money it would be for him, thinking of the percentage she would lose to turn them back to U.S. dollars if she did.  Him, pushing the money away when she offered it – other times, he wanted money, gifts, but not from her.  Her, letting tears stream down as she told him she wanted him to take it.  Him, asking her to lay next to him for a little while longer. Her, asking him what he really wanted.  Him, saying just more time, more time with you, to pass more time with you.  Her, wrapping her legs around him. Them, kissing, consuming, kissing.  Him, using the suitcase she gave to him after disbursing all the gifts she had brought in it to pack for his first trip out of this country.  Her, laying next to the man she slept with in her country, only their feet touching as they drifted off to a deep sleep, missing the way this man wrapped himself around her even in sleep.

That night I dreamt of those two, and thought of them many times ever since.  The story I wanted to write for them had another reunion, a permanent one or one of permanent recurrence.  But I could never quite clearly envision it.  I kept weaving through the story that their touch told me, but as I’d take the story further, I’d have to address the peripheral stories that inevitably arise and I didn’t want to.  So, I’d freeze time. I didn’t want to temper the magic I felt watching these two with the peripheral.  I wanted their magic to be real.

But here, six months later, in the muggy heat of July, I see the peripheral story couldn’t be avoided by me freezing the time in my mind.  He is sitting to the right in front of me, his head looking out the window still, while his hand seems to be resting on the knee of this woman in a flowered dress, the woman who is now with him and who is not her.  This woman’s skin tone different, her hair different, her poise and mannerisms nothing familiar to me and nothing, nothing at all, like the other.  We move slowly toward Old Havana, stuck in traffic caused by a rare accident near the Revolution Museum.  Everyone is restless but I am grateful for the time to study these two – do they have that same magic? Those same wires of electricity aching to touch the other person, upon which moments and moments are built and shaped?  Maybe it is the high bench of the front seat or, more likely, the bias of my mind, but I can’t tell. I don’t know what I want the answer to be.  I don’t want my memory of the tenderness and connection I witnessed lessened; I don’t want the reality of it lessened.  But would magic here in this taxi, with this other woman, lessen what I witnessed six months ago?

Our taxi stops and the older gentleman to my right gets out of the car and wonders slowly without focus up Escobar Ave.  This familiar and striking man opens the front door, and he and the woman slide out and cross the street to walk along the Malecon wall, holding hands, smiling.  We have a bit more to drive, as we head toward the art warehouse to see if the woman who sells coffee, coconut and red wine flavored soap is there today.   I scoot away from my husband, temporarily having more space in the backseat and needing air around me to cool off.  He seems grateful for the space I give him.

I gaze out the window and imagine the ache if they never spoke again, if they never saw each other again.  What if they disappeared from each other’s lives – one aching for the other, then vice verse, but at different points in time?  Her readjusting back into her relationships with American men, those men in awe of her subtle fire but containing pieces of themselves in a way this man never did.  Him, meeting women in France or Italy or whatever European country he went to, reconnecting with previous visitors who had met him in Cuba, returning a few months later to pick up the fleeting relationships he would have here. I see them exchanging some notes here and there, then, somewhere along the line, without explanation, him cutting off communication, not wanting her to find out about all the other women.  He wonders, every day, whether she still thinks of him.  When she realizes she can’t get a hold of him anymore, her only hurt being that she couldn’t tell him that she didn’t care about the other women that preceded or followed her.  She’d always known they existed, just as men preceded and followed him.  But she never got to tell him and they never got tangled up in each other’s smiles again, never tasted each other’s laughter again.  A final goodbye never said. What if that – that distance, that misunderstanding, that silence – was the ending? If that was the ending – then what exactly did I witness that night that he tasted her laughter and her tears?

Once upon a time I thought if the ending wasn’t a fairy tale, the middle moments weren’t part of such a romantic tale either.  I believed the ending qualified the story – without an “ever after”, there never really was a “happily” all along, never the love and energy and magic that we bind up in that concept.  My husband opens the door behind the driver, climbs out, and forgets to offer me his hand as I push myself out of the backseat, and I realize how silly, how backwards, I had it.  The ending, in fact, doesn’t matter at all.