ManWithAPlan

Yeah, i wrote this a little while ago... some of the formatting is messed up right now because i did it in word... enjoy


Why is it that the most important and acclaimed emotion that one can feel for another is also the one that can be most taxing and painful? It must be true that pain is a good teacher, but the wise and caring are the ones who must endure the most suffering.
Life is not only the great paradox in that it leads inevitably to death.

In life there are those who love superficially, as they see it they are supposed to love so they do, and there are those who love out of love itself. The latter will never give up on love. Granted, it takes them longer to find love, and love will torture them infinitely - but once they attain love, they will pursue it past life itself.
The prior would believe Lord Alfred Tennyson when he said, "It's better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all." The latter will get a pain in their chests at the notion of loss. Yes, the so-called hopeless romantics kneel before Sigmund Freud who said:

"We are never so helplessly unhappy as when we lose love."

This is a simple story, but a true one - a story about love equally true. As with all true stories, the beginning is an abstract notion which is absolutely dependant on the way one chooses to see things.
There were two, but they were as one, sharing everything, agreeing in a single minded wholeness beset by beauty. It is not known for sure why, but one might guess that it was this quality of closeness that drove Her away from Him in the end. I call it the end, but it is really only the beginning of the tragedy, or the climax of the ordeal.
They met - several times - at a coffee shop in the morning. Each day they'd catch glimpses of each other, each sitting in his or her normal seat - every day. Each day they would each be alone, stealing inconspicuous glances at each other but only when they were certain that gazes would never meet. After a year, they still never spoke, but they came to relish each other's faces as they relished their coffee.
One day it rained and chance reared its mighty, shapeless head, setting Him and Her just less than a foot apart in line to get their breakfast. Immediately He was intoxicated by Her scent, it filled ever pore in his nose and worked its way into his heart. He wiped a tear from the corner of his eye; He was so lonely.
"That's just the way I like mine. too," He said as she made her order. She looked back at him, trying to hide her shock. The tall dark man who was the subject of her musing imagination for the past year - the man she always looked at, but never spoke to - spoke to her.
"I've noticed you," She said, trying to seem nonchalant.
"And I you." He said, in no more than a whisper.
He left with Her, without his breakfast: They walked off into the rain, sharing an umbrella. Neither one wondered at the strangeness of this meeting, nor how quickly they grew intimate.

Rarely would an observer see them apart, and when they were apart they were together in each other's thoughts. It so came to be that He switched jobs and ended up working in the same building as Her. They would still go to the same coffee shop each morning, although they sat together now, and spoke.
He'd bury his face in her hair for minutes at a time, absorbing the fragrance which he adored more than anything in the world and never wonder at the improbabilities which brought them there. She would rest her head on his chest and just listen to his heart beat until her own matched perfectly the rhythm.
One day - a beautiful day as it might have been - She met him outside the coffee shop; her lips were red and swollen for she'd been chewing on them relentlessly the night before.
"It can't be. We can't be. I'm Sorry. It's not you it's me. It just can't be. Too much." She stammered in a way which touched his heart even as it broke it. He stood there, his arms poised for a hug, palms upturned. She looked down and stalked away. He stood there. Tears pushed through the long- shut vessels which carried them and force themselves overboard his eyelids, creating two twin rivers racing down His cheeks.
Though She could not bring herself to love him anymore - for fear of loving him too much - she wanted to see his face again, but to work he never came. Nor the next day. Nor the day after that.
Each day she found a dozen roses on her desk, no doubt from him. She knew his phone, she knew his address, but she would never call or visit. As weeks past she came to work earlier and earlier to try to catch him, or the delivery boy. She saw neither.
She stayed later and later, but to no avail. She asked others whether they had seen anyone plant the roses on her desk, but the answer was always the same. Each night she cried her self to sleep, but she could not bring herself to love him.

They say perfection is the ultimate flaw.

Too much were the nights they spent together, as were the days and the countless moments which were too perfect even for Hollywood.

One day She noticed something on the roses which was not on any previous dozen. A small card folded in half, attached to one of the stems. As She unfolded it, all she saw was whiteness. She stared closely at the card, confounded. She absorbed every ridge and miniature crater in the card. Absolutely blank.
She crushed the messenger-rose with one flustered hand and tossed the rest on the floor. She stormed out of the office, clutching the carcass-and- note and she walked as fast as her heals and dripping eyes would permit her.
At the corner of one street, in front of the pedestrian crossing she stopped as a car stopped, blocking her way. She looked through the window of the car, but the tinted glass offered her only a reflection.
She saw a woman whom she did not recognize. She saw none of the beauty which He'd always bragged about. She saw two salt-water rapids gushing down, one on each side of her face. She could feel the tears drying, leaving the slightly-sticky salt on her cheeks. She saw Herself, clutching a rose by the head, as one should grab love itself. Repulsed She was, yet she looked deeper, deeper within her eyes, the eyes which she was so used to seeing reflected in His.
Then She knew. It was never that She did not love him, it was that she loved him too much and could not bear it. So she pulled off her shoes, tossing them on the sidewalk and she ran barefoot to his apartment; despite the closeness, there was always something pushing him away, something like fear which drew him back.
She knocked frantically on the door and ducked out of site of the spyhole.

He sat there in his apartment at that moment in a recliner chair in front of his coffee table on which lay a dozen roses. In his hand were a pen and a card. He stared intently at the card as if he were reading it, only it was blank, blank as all the others. Just a moment before she knocked on his door, the pen snapped in his hand, dribbling blue ink over the black stains on his palm and fingers.
Knowingly, he stood up and walked past a small mirror to his door with no attempt to regain his composure. Had he looked in the mirror he would have seen a man who looked twenty years older, with hair growing unevenly on his face; he had scarcely left his place these past weeks so he had no reason to shave anymore, no reason to bathe anymore, and no reason to eat anymore. He drank only water and just as much as he could without vomiting. Food and drink couldn't fill the void in his stomach and chest that pushed everything else away with its presence.

For that brief moment, time slowed down for Him and for Her. She stood there, weeping, pounding on the door with her fists for an eternity which lasted mere seconds. He lay his hand on the door knob, his other on the lock. Slowly, timelessly he unlatched the lock and turned the knob, opening the door and stepping back against the wall as if knowing what was to come.
She ran in and turned with the speed of gas expanding in a supernova, her overcoat swirling like a ballerinas skirt in all but its lack of color. She flew, ran and simultaneously fell into his arms, sobbing violently.
"I knew you'd come," he said, gulping, "maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day I knew you'd come."
"How?" She asked, between sobs.
"You forget. Do not forget. I just know." He leaned back and tapped his nose in the familiar way, the same way he always did, during the times that now seemed like distant memories rival with those of the golden age of childhood. She felt so old just moments ago. Now they both felt young again.
For an eternity they stayed at his open doorway, sobbing in each other's embrace. After the moment was over she leaned back and wiped her face with the corner of her coat and looked up in his eyes, as she did the first time so long ago after ordering her coffee. She licked her reddened lips and gulped, then asked,
"What if..." she gulped again.
"What if I had let you go?" he replied simply and evenly, in his soothing tone. She stared him an answer, yes, so he continued, "Did my actions really surprise you? Was I not the one who said to grab love by the head?" She stared at him incredulously and just then she noticed that she was still clutching the now ragged rose in her hand. She brought her hand from around his back, under his arm and pressed it to his chest.

He looked down at her, still clutching the rose, but pressing it against his chest and he smiled a smile which they both knew said something beyond words, beyond anything I can communicate to you, but to give a vague estimate, the smile mentioned how funny things work out, love, coincidences and how in love they thought in unity.
One might misunderstand me and think that the purpose of this account was to contrast lovers type-A and type-B. The purpose was abstract, it was to give whatever you may take of it, and certainly to show that both He and She pursued love.

__________________
In the end we are but wisps