Inspired by the song of the same name by Vienna Teng.
*
“Just kidding. This was a terrible idea,” she says as they finally pull out of the hug. “Coming with you to the airport,” she clarifies when he asks.
Given the choice again, she would still come with him. There's no doubt about that. But goodbyes are hard. She's barely managed to grasp this and now she's watching it slip away. Watching him slip away.
The airport feels empty late on a Tuesday night. They walk through the yawning expanse of white tile, hand in hand. Mi amor, he calls her casually, like this feeling isn't a mere few weeks old.
The stark lights are surreal.
“When will you come back?” she asks, yet again. What she means is, will he come back at all?
The course of life is a tide that neither of them can predict. She can't tell if he hesitates because he accepts this, or if he knows something she doesn't. And yet, she feels in her bones that they are inevitable in some way.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“I’m just a man,” he says.
“I’m not special,” he says.
She holds his face in her hands. His beard is surprisingly soft. “I think you might be,” she tells him.
She wonders when she became the girl unabashedly kissing a boy in the middle of terminal 3 at midnight.
They say goodbye in all the languages they know. Some of them mean see you again and see you soon. She speaks them with faith, like she knows them to be true, though she does not.
You choose which lies to believe.
This is where it ends.
*
But where does it begin?
Perhaps it’s Monday, when he tells her he has to leave. He hasn’t been back to Mexico in over a year and a half. Returning home for a grandmother's funeral is her worst nightmare. He tells her and her heart cries for him. It cries for the time she thought they had. But this is not about them anymore.
They walk and walk in the sunny afternoon, and she lets herself shine through. She lets herself feel the tension. She lets herself feel the inevitability.
(She lets him hide his grief.)
She should have worn sunscreen.
She sits on the gate at the side of the road, because stopping to pick dandelions has become the activity of the day, blowing seeds at each other like children. She makes no real decision by sitting on the fence, but maybe she does. He stands in front of her and lets her distract herself with a thumb war until he’s not fighting anymore.
She pokes at his thumb with her own. “Do something,” she says.
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?” he asks again. He is so very close.
“Yes,” she says.
He kisses her.
*
Maybe it starts the night of the latin club, when she realizes she's jealous of the girl he's been hanging out with. Jealousy is not a feeling she likes to entertain, so she chalks it up to misreading the situation and keeps her distance. Sweat soaks through borrowed satin, and she gets lost in the music. She dances bachata with strangers, stepping into a familiar thrill she hasn't felt in months.
She is content with herself. That is enough.
Still, satisfaction creeps in, because she's a good dancer and now he knows it. And when she finally dances with him at the end of the night, she knows she's not imagining the pull between them. She lets her fingers linger on the soft fabric of his shirt, and helps him lead her.
*
Maybe it happens during one of many late conversations in the kitchen about everything, in which he lays bare his life philosophies, or one in which he picks her apart and makes her feel exposed but heard.
"You choose which lies to believe," he says about traditions, superstitions, and cultural convictions of death. It sounds disheartening, to see so much of the human experience as fabricated and therefore meaningless. But he is too impassioned to be truly disheartened. She wonders which lies he believes that he isn't telling her.
It is a beautiful thing, to wonder about what makes up another person's being.
*
Maybe it starts with a walk to the store for paint supplies. Maybe it starts with his request for a latte heart. Maybe it starts with an interrogation of her worldview while he's vacuuming.
*
She returns from a friend's apartment and finds a new face behind the counter. She's so thrown that she doesn't even remember to be friendly.
He's grounded and intense in a way that the other staff are not. His spark of intelligence shines through almost immediately, and it shouldn't catch her by surprise but it does.
Who the hell is that guy? she wonders.