ALONE

There are those times, when my thoughts wander off on a journey of their own. Times like when I sit alone over a cup of coffee in the sunset, or when I am working on routine tasks that don’t need my focus. My thoughts travel on this winding circuitous route, through memories and facts and musings and secrets, eventually, to you.

And I can’t help but think about you all over again. Sometimes I go over memories I shared with you, the time we sat alone late into the night outside your door and talked, the time we planned to travel together to another town but it never worked out, the time I called you from in the middle of a play to tell you that you should have come. And then, where the memory ends, I just make up a story as I go along – from sitting talking outside your house, we make a crazy plan to go watch the sunrise over a lake a hundred miles away, and the plan to travel together to another city does work out and we have the time of our lives, and when I call you from in the middle of the play, you ask me to turn around and you are sitting in the row behind me.

And then I wander deeper about you. I remember images, of your smile, of your hair, of your tears, and your frown. And I’ll remember how I felt about you, but never quite told you. My mind tries to create its own story where I do tell you everything, and I play it again and again in my head imagining different reactions from you every time.

I’ll go on to remember the awkward silence in the car, as I drove you to the airport. And I’ll remember that moment when you walked in, and I stayed out, and I didn’t call out to you, and you didn’t look back. Another story sparks off on its own, sometimes I imagine you running back into my arms, and other times I imagine that you look back shake your head and carry on nonetheless.

I look down at the coffee in my hand the sunset in my eyes, or at my computer screen at what I was supposed to be doing, and shake myself back into the present. I dare to remember what you looked like one last time, before I finish my coffee, or start with the next round of operations on my computer.

And the last thing I think on the subject is my own lonliness.