Ends
You walk so fast, those long legs of yours, you’re always leaving me behind. It used to annoy me or make me sad but now it’s just a matter of course. Except it is sad, I suppose, that you walking away from me has become the way that I expect things to be.
What are we doing? What am I doing?
You always turn back though. You always turn back to me. Sometimes with impatience, sometimes with the warmth you might grant a favored child. But you always turn back and maybe that’s the part that I’m giving emphasis to, the part that I’m making important.
I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing.
It’s disconcerting to reach an age that anyone would consider grown up – I mean, you get this close to 40 and you are absolutely grown up – and still find yourself in situations where you just have no sense of certainty over the right choice, the right path. There’s no knowing whether it’s a great leap of faith or a futile and pathetic delay of the inevitable. The ultimate label for the action is determined not by the action itself, but by how things work out in the end.
I’m wasting my time here, aren’t I? Am I wasting my time?
I love the way you look squarely at me when I laugh, as if your joy is magnified by mine.
I hate your temper, like flash paper, so sudden and bright and hot.
I love how tender you are in those brief glimpses you give me of your heart.
This doesn’t have an end yet, but I suspect it’s coming.
Rivka Jacobs
Wonderful character study, without the reader having to know any of the worldly details. You focus on the relationship, the emotions, and thereby delineate the two protagonists.
Much is revealed by the narrator, psychological and subtle information. (The partnership seems to be unbalanced, but not hopeless.) But a lot of it rings true for me personally, and it’s hard for me to remained unbiased when I read this story. I want the narrator to say, “It’s over,” but as you say, making a choice like this is only judged “good” or “bad” based on the outcome, not any careful consideration at the time.
A delicate and elegant piece, Cyn. I will miss you on EW, and I hope you return to the rotation asap!
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Nicolas Papaconstantinou
Is this part of that other sequence, the one that’s normally so easy to identify cos it’s dialogue?
It feels like the same couple to me. A beautifully observed coda to the sequence, if that’s what it is – it doesn’t say that it’s a conclusion to the relationship, but it does show us roughly what shape that conclusion might take, however long it takes to arrive.
I love your stuff, Cyn!
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