There were days we used to sit at the pier, stretching our
legs across the open expanse of blue, watching with utter fascination the tiny
ripples shuddering outwards to waves of enormous, once thought unconquerable
ripples. It was more an elongated porch than an actual pier, but we'd imagined
it be just the same.
We’d vividly paint a picture of bright, autumn coloured balloons,
soft pinks and vivid Halloween oranges. He’d try the bottle game and I’d be
eating tooth-achingly sweet cotton candy on side, cheering all the while. But
it never lasted. All too soon our mothers would be calling, exasperated looks
on their faces at our muddy clothes.
But now I sit here, grown up and feeling
so old, when really it wasn’t so long ago that we’d played here carefree and
not yet sixteen. It didn’t I was a girl and he, a boy. It hadn’t meant anything
that he was four years older, and wiser and smarter. It hadn’t… But it was as if one day I wasn’t
enough. As if our lake and our games and our belly aching laughter wasn’t
enough.
So now I sit and reminiscing of a simpler time - a time when
my other half had been beside me. A time mother did not sit in a chair and
stair into dusty space, eyes gone out like a candle hopelessly waving its ember
drawn smoke. Now I sit under a cloudy day, wondering if I it was I who cried or
the sky more in the depths of my despair.
What happened to the years had? The years we called us? He
grew out of this small town, but now I have to grow out of us.
But how do you say goodbye to you and me when there feels like
there never was an us?
