Just Because

Did you know I'm scared of octopuses?" she said. "Octo-what?" He said, frowning. "Octopuses- you know, more than one octopus."

"Why not an octopus? Why octopuses?"

"Because it's octopuses I'm scared of, silly," she said, laughing.

That was always the reason with her. He always found that hard to accept. In his world, things weren't just were. There was a reason. Three times four is twelve, because if you add three to three four times you get twelve. He's scared of mice because when he was three a mouse bit his ears. The sunset is beautiful because even though the sun disappears, it is actually still shining in another location. When he mentioned this, she laughed at him.

He found her hardest to accept of all. Why she, a free-loving hippie attending an art college an hour away from the Boston, would date him, an Ivy League to-be engineer, was baffling. Why, too, she thought it necessary to dump him during a raging blizzard by texting, "The blizzard whisked our love away. It's over," he didn't know.

Now, spread eagle on the university's front lawn, oblivious to the wondering glances of passerbies, he wondered why he had loved her. Was it because she was as unpredictable as the nature she so loved, one moment shining, then pouring salty tears, then leaving him blue-lipped and forgotten, then blowing him away as easily as the wind did his hat, never to be retrieved? He looked at the shadows cast on the grass by the dying sun, and he thought, "That's beautiful," and he wanted to call her and tell her that, finally, he understood, and couldn't she give him a second chance? But then, he thought, No. He knew he had loved her once, just because, like he knew now that she no longer loved him, just because.