The Wrong Love "This is wrong..." I broke away from our embrace, turning away sharply as if from some horrid sight or smell. However, I turned from neither of these. I had turned away from a path which would inevitably lead to anguish and pain, a road which I had already been very familiar with in the past. She looked at me with her mellow eyes which melted me every time under their gaze, but this time they would fail. This time it had gone too far. She waited patiently, her face full of an innocent concern which seems almost feigned now. She took one hand from my leg and clasped it with her other that had been around my neck. She rested them together in her lap and waited. I built up every ounce of courage I had left and met her gaze. Silence fell over us as I thought of how happy I could be with her. Then I felt no doubt she was also thinking of us together, but I soon realized her mind was a foreign book I couldn’t ever hope to understand. Its plot weaving and ducking, full of twists and turns the reader couldn’t predict, then a turning point that would change the story completely, new paths and situations suddenly revealed. She took my hands into my own and squeezed them tightly. A mild warmth passed over me, like I had passed a steam vent on a cold street. I longed to linger, but I knew I couldn’t. Her soft voice welled with emotion. "What's wrong?" She knew what was wrong, and knew that I knew this. But it was obligatory, it needed to be said. To get the wheels turning so that she may reverse the process. It was a soap opera, and we were the actors. She had more experience than me; she had done this all before. Each expression on her face, each spoken word, it was written in a script I hadn’t seen. The audience waited with hushed anticipation, right on the edge of their seats. "Will he give her up?" "Has she trapped him in her web?" The tension mounted. But we were alone. No camera crew, no audience. Just me, her, and a cat, somewhere, in her friend’s apartment. Outside the city churned quietly in the dusty evening sun, so as not to disturb us. Or maybe it was listening in, awaiting each move almost as much as she was. "You know." I said this to buy myself more time. I couldn’t think why, all the time in the world wouldn’t mend the problems I, we, were facing. My eyes wandered away. Running, almost, away from her own to take in a nearby painting. It depicted a lone woman sitting in darkness. A few features visible in its diminishing pastel light. Of what I could see, she was hunched over, her body facing away but her face looking round slightly, a glisten in her eye. It made me think of a small child who had been scalded for a bad deed, assigning herself to a corner, looking round now and again for sympathy but never finding it in her parent’s faces. But this was a grown woman, and instead, my thoughts evolved into some sort of asylum. She looked mad, hunched away in some empty cell. Her friend was an art student. His apartment littered with various art works on the walls. But as I looked over an assortment of beer cans over the floor, a few games magazines about to slip off the arm of a graying chair in the corner, I couldn’t help myself but think the flat itself looked like modern art. My attention focused on the table in front of us, crammed with bottles and ash trays, full the brim with ash, cigarettes and spent spliffs. A fine mist still hung in the air around us from a few hours before, a party which had disbanded off to a pub somewhere. The fumes, now, worked with her, and tried to make me light headed. I couldn’t relax though, something else hung in the air that night. A realization she had seemed to be able to keep away from me, but it had returned. I prepared my voice for the exasperation and anguish I was feeling. “What am I doing?!” I broke away, rising from the shabby brown sofa to a nearby window. The chair squealed violently at my departure, I did not look back. Through the single glazed windows, shaded slightly by the mass of pollution from the main road just ahead, the distant lights spread out before me, creating a sprinkle of fireflies in some sort of oil painting. I tried to imagine each those roads the radiance danced above, lit for the winter night drivers. Their sub routes and pathways illuminated until they reached their home. I saw no lighting on the dirt track of my life; it lay before me, untouched and unknown. The mist blanketing my vision from afar, swirling angrily at me, I saw no way out. Closer, on the main road, I watched few cars race down and off into the distance. The headlights nothing but a blur, a streak of silk into the horizon. How I wished I could do that. A random young woman hurried along the path in a large black three quarter coat, contrasting with her reddened face against the north wind. Her arms hugged herself tightly, maybe even trying to keep some pain in her life in. I couldn’t tell, my own grief clouded my vision. I could no longer see into any life, but only out of my own. “Steve.” Her voice penetrated my locked self, as if pushing open the large doors of an old castle, shouting my name into the depths of the black corridors. It echoed down, deeper, off the stone walls and into the very soul. I could not ignore it, I looked back to where she sat. Tonight she wore a black silk top with a patterned black skirt to match. She wore her blonde hair down so it hung to her shoulders, the way she knew I liked it. The only jewelry she wore was a small gold chain around her neck, and her regular stud earrings, a tiny black jewel inside of them. "I know this doesn’t seem right now, it’s complicated and will hurt other people, but I know in my heart its right to follow our feelings through." I let the words sink deeper into me. `It’s complicated and will hurt other people.' `I know in my heart its right.' `Our feelings.' Each small extract seem to equal or counter the thoughts in my head. My defenses were failing, each reason not to go on seemed less important in the light of what I, we, could have. She got up slowly and came towards me. Her figure was beautiful, silhouetted against a small table lamp behind her, the only light in the room. Only the pale yellow glow from the outside world bathed her face in light to reveal her silky skin filled with a deeply loving expression. She wasn't a bad person, she was the most likeable friend I could ever hope for. Always having a good laugh, always understanding, a person you could really relate and talk to. But it was when you get close to a person you enter deeper into their soul and you begin to see another nature. She really didn’t know what she wanted, leaving a trail of broken hearts behind her, each with a separate and more desperate story. She looped her hands around my neck once again, standing against the city sky I drew her closer as my hands slipped around her back, a natural response. She went into a kiss, but I sharply fought back. "What about John, Anne. Don't you care for him?" She stopped, and withdrew as the question came out, almost away from it. Her head tilted to one side, her eyes on a distant object through the window, in no doubt feeling obliged to answer my question. She sighed. "He's not what I’m looking for..." "And I am? I wasn't before..." The harsh reality forced her further away, her grip on me loosened as her eyes narrowed to mine. "Life isn't always so straight forward." My feelings gave way to a small softening in my face. She saw it too and proceeded harder with it. "I thought I wanted him, I thought that he was what I needed in my future. It isn't, it has only been these last few weeks that I have seen you in the light I once did when we first went out, except its brighter Steve. Much brighter." She moved in closer, to kill off my last defenses. I could feel her warm breath against my face. "Steve I know this is right, this time I’m sure." We had broken up a few months before. Then it had been the excuse of not wanting a deep relationship, but that excuse seem to fade as I watched her fall madly in love with many different boys that came across her path. We had remained good friends, I was the only ex that had. This reasoning of our long lasting friendship swelled up inside me like a rebellion, crushing the forward ranks from behind. I gave in, and we kissed deeply. The familiar prickling sensation on the back of my neck raged and I pulled her closer. A deeper connection than I could ever explain flowed between us and a kind of heat wrapped around us. My rationale reasoning failing under her inescapable power. A hollow thumping sounded from outside the door shattered the serenity. We looked around, adrenaline from both events coursing through my veins, still in each others arms. The reason for my reluctance crashed through the door in a drunken state with a bottle in one hand. He stumbled to the floor, widely grabbing the nearest object to pull up on. Empty bottles and CD cases went flying as he used the table to level himself, then I saw his eyes. A raging storm, struggling to be contained, roared inside them. They seemed to disrupt the very room by themselves. For a fleeting moment I thought of whirlwinds and typhoons crossing great oceans towards land. The fear as it gathers speed and energy, thrashing the water violently in all directions, announcing it's presence to the inhabitants of the nearest island. I knew that any second, this force would be released on me, the low lying path in a tropical wasteland. Regaining himself, he stood upright, taller than I had ever seen him, towering, ready to give out punishment upon me. I picked up the nearest weapon I could, a large heavy ornament depicting Gaia from Greek mythology. He grasped the bottle in his hand, and with as much vigor as he could muster threw it towards Anne. Missing her by inches it smashed upon the wall, his anger reflected in every shard spreading across the surface and on to the floor. I stood there, helpless and stunned. He was concentrating his anger on her, each fierce movement, I could see it in his eyes. He was hurt, and wanted to hurt back. She broke away from once again, moving quickly to the far side of the room she picked up a tea-tray half concealed under one of the other tables and held in front of her, stance ready for another attack. John fumbled for a new bottle and then, quicker than my own reactions, continued the onslaught. This time Anne was ready, with experience born from her Netball playing days, reflected the projectile against the other wall, its contents created a blood stain strewn along it. A grief no like other. He had given her the greatest gift he had. A gift he had inside of him as everyone did, nourished and kept safe until the right person wandered across his path. The gift was love, and he had chosen her to share this precious entity with, as so many had in the past. But she had taken it and ran, leaving the other half still in his hands, perhaps never to be fully repaired. It wasn’t her fault. It was as if she put every man she saw under a spell, no-one could help but love her, but she was unsure of what she wanted, needed, and so any man who invested their love in her took a great gamble. John, equally amazed at Anne’s reactions, reached for another bottle. Arm far back, and unsteady on his feet, his grip on the bottle suddenly faltered as he dropped to his knees in a collapse of emoticon. He slumped there, releasing it all in fits of desperate wails. He looked tall no more, uncontrollably crying now he was a man robbed of a soul. My thoughts crossed the flat once again to a few pictures in the distant corner, pictures of grim landscapes with people reaching for the end. Anne and I relaxed our stance, staring at him, then at each other. The force of his actions faded just as fast as they had begun, he was no threat now. I didn't know how she felt, seeing him lie there, broken, but my insides drained away from me as I once again remembered the feelings when she first left me. The sudden hole in my life, the sudden feeling of not being wanted, the gap left from not being loved. I could only imagine this as being ten times worse, not to be let down softly, but having to walk in on it, probably after being told by one of the party goers after we were left behind in the flat. Anne took a swift glance at me, she was saying we needed to finish this later, and went to comfort John. She went tell him everything will be alright, to tell him it wasn’t the end of the world. In a few weeks or months time it may not be. But for him, now, there was no point going on when a large fragment of his life left him for another man. Nothing could have been worse than to be cast aside in this way. Anne’s friend’s cat appeared at the door. In the dim light, it was almost unrecognizable. A soft and beautiful creature to be, I thought. The light flowed off its silky black coat; its deep amber eyes incrusted with jewels subtly studied the scene. It moved further into the flat as quietly as fragrance in the wind, and I then saw something in its mouth jerk. As quick as it had entered it dashed to the kitchen, unseen by Anne now with her arms round John on the floor, to finish its meal.
Copyright © 2003 Samuel James Chase |