Waiting For What Never Was

Fiction Issue #2 : A Short Story

A solitary wanderer in the quest to Transcend by Caspar David Friedrich. [Wikipedia]

Fingers tapping on the cold metal railing, heart beating like raging waves, I stood there. I felt the warmth of the soft sun against my cheek and the spring breeze through my hair. My eyes were fixed on the street below, longing to see just her.

I was early, of course. My mother always told me, and she claimed her mother told her, one can never be on time so it’s better to be early. My mother’s mother was dead. Always had been. Always will be. The habit, on the other hand, was alive.

I checked my watch. Nine-ten. She was late. Maybe she wouldn’t come after all, in which case, I could hurl myself off the cliff conveniently.

The storm in my chest raged on. Any louder and my heart would pop out of my chest. Who could blame this fool though? After all, it had been five years since—

“What if she doesn’t show up?” I whispered.

More people flowed through the street now. Each face was the same as any to me yet each story was different. Isn’t that what life was? A story, a drama, and I was the hero of mine. Of course, I had no idea what story I was living. As clueless as I was a year ago, and the year before that, and let’s be honest, every year before that.

Twenty-five years of utter cluelessness. There were times when I wondered if it was even worth it. If I could simply end it, would time cease to exist and so would I? People think they would end up in heaven or hell or be incarnated in a different life. My father thought so and so did my mother, bless her heart. I don’t know what my mother’s mother thought. She had always been dead. She was still dead. I thought it was all a bunch of bull, not that it mattered what I thought. Who cared what a twenty-something-old jobless loner had to say about God? Certainly not me.

With a jolt I got pulled out of my thoughts. A skinny little girl had slammed an arm of her bicycle into my arm. She stopped, finding her balance she looked at me. Her guilty eyes asked for permission to leave. I gave her a gentle encouraging smile as I rubbed my arm where the bicycle had met me. In an instant, she forgot about the whole affair and took off, her two braided ponytails rising out of her tiny head like two fountains out of a pond.

Still massaging my arm I looked at the vast valley in front of me, an entire city flooded it like algae in a stagnant pond. I looked at the rising mountains beyond the city, jagged scars covering most of them. They were once covered with lush green trees until they started blowing up the mountains for whatever treasures they blew up mountains for. Who needed trees anyway?

Now I wasn’t too sentimental about the place, this or any other for that matter. I mean, you’ve got to live somewhere. Places were just that. Pieces of land filled with people breathing because they have to. All places were the same. The same people filled up the same streets and the same buildings. The only thing different? The names. I know I shouldn’t be so indifferent about such things. But we feel what we feel.

There was a sadness within me, deep where no one but me could reach it yet constantly crawling up, insidiously, to pull me down and apart. A sadness that I didn’t quite understand. A sadness that became a certain kind of loneliness. A sadness that just sat there, perpetually, purposelessly—

There she was! Slowly zigzagging her way through the moving crowd, like a clownfish swimming against the current. The same cold breeze sifted through her dark curly hair. Her eyes, oh her eyes, hiding behind those sunglasses, searching for me. She had a small backpack resting gently on her back, tiny pink and green petals sprinkled across her blue sundress.

She was on the street below me and walked past where I was standing above her. She kept walking, searching for me. I stood there frozen, lost. My eyes followed her. I might have forgotten how to breathe.

I snapped out of my trance and started to follow her slowly. We had decided to meet at the fork where the two roads converged. That morning, my eyes fixated on her, my body navigated on its own, a million thoughts racing through my mind, the storm raging on and on in my chest. Years of longing. Pining. It had all led to this moment.

She reached the spot and stopped, still searching for me. I slowed down, adding distance between myself and the moment I had been waiting for years. Gently, I tapped her on her shoulder. She turned. And for the first time, I looked at her. Her perfect eyes. Her perfect hair. Her perfect everything. I saw her, just her, and everyone else disappeared. Time stood frozen, and so did I.

We both smiled. Words ceased to exist and my mind was blank. The storm that had been raging had passed and the waves were still. In that one still moment an eternity had passed.

One word broke the silence, the illusion, and everything faded.

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