The Wind Whispered Forget

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There’s something so amazing about the way people interact, the way the mind tries to compensate for the soul. On windy Saturdays, Alex and I would go wait in the park for a story to come to us. As young kids, we’d place ourselves in the lives of others, imagined we lived as them – through them – and so, probably lived more romances than most could imagine.

I loved the young couples, like us, who’d walk hand in hand, trying to get a hold of as much of each other as possible as if the world might end if they parted for an instant. He liked the older couples, the 50-year success stories with grandkids who’ve left the nest, leaving them alone to rekindle their romance. As time passed, the success stories stopped coming. Soon, most everyone stayed indoors and we were forced to look to our own successes and lives for answers to what awaited us.

It seemed as if the age of romanticism and eternal devotion withered away until finally, it died with him.

I cannot lie and say I don’t regret our time together. I regret the time we’ll never have. I regret never being able to walk the park as a success story, proud of our wrinkles and history. I still go on some Saturdays, though it’s not the same with ducks for company.

Every time the wind crosses my path, I imagine a great ribbon of color unfolding in the leaves before me like a present, and I see us. I see him trying to tackles me into a pile of bright autumn leaves at age nine and again at nineteen. I can sometime hear his laughter too as if he were right there next to me. And on Monday mornings, I hear his groggy voice and feel his lips trying to wake me with kisses. But I go on about my days with nothing but memories and dreams and photos that can never truly capture what it meant for him to love me, just me, for all his days. No one’s been able to make me feel as safe.

I never told anyone about Saturdays in the park. In a few years, no one will ever know our story or understand why our names are carved on that park bench. Even the memory of us is forever tainted by tearstains. But I still refuse to admit that some dark part of me wishes we’d never met, a part that lives in the ventricle that never heals, where his name is still carved just the same – a part that never grows with me, never lets go of what we had.

I walked to the park like always on a windy Saturday lunch. There was a new couple in our bench, staring at the people pass. A part of me wanted to warn them, another to cry in mourning, but I just smiled and kept on my path. And no one will ever know that once, twenty years ago, that had been us.

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By AriadneinLove.