Tuesday, September 9, 2014

It’s Sunday, on a cool Dallas morning, and I’m writing these first few lines in a coffee shop while I wait for her to arrive. The triteness begins and ends there, however, because this is to be a final meeting. How did we go from Thursday, packed with promise of the new, to this unraveling? I’m still trying to process it. I may never fully process it, either.

It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. There have been ups and downs since that first evening, as would be expected, but this development was a sucker punch to me. Normally I enjoy parsing people and situations with some degree of accuracy. Clearly I missed something substantial in this situation, though, and here, at this coffee shop, I would find out the whats and the whys.

We opened with small talk. On any other day, this would have quickly wended to interesting talk, but this time, we lingered on the inconsequential. And part of me could’ve stayed there, in the little topics, for a while longer. But I guided conversation back to the roads taken and not taken, revisited prior dates and conversations in a new light, and asked her other questions.

And the talk took its own course. She would deftly fill the natural silences, as was her way, and during lighter moments, there was that smile. But there were also moments when the timber would change: quieter, sadder, and it was fucking gutwrenching. I had three theories, I told her, for how we ended up here.

The first theory was that the cultural gap remained too large, and I didn’t exactly fit into the narrative she and her friends had written for more than a decade. The second theory was that I had misread her personality for chemistry. The third was that she had met someone else. It was the second theory, she said, and although I believe her in part, I also have my doubts because I don’t know if there is an alternative reading for every kiss. But you’ve got to take the truth with the fiction, and then you move on–because there are other leviathans in the sea.