ETERNAL ANNIVERSARY III: NO MORE LIES
4:34:00 PM
A very tender song that was once so
close to my heart starts playing on the radio. “I knew that this moment would come in time that I’d have to let go and
watch you fly”, that sober voice on ubiquitous speakers inside this coffee
shop somehow finds a spot inside my head, down my memory lane, making me grin a
little as I gulp down my latte for the second time. 5:30 pm habit. This is one
of the few honest things left in my life.
After work every weekday, I drop by
at this not-so-crowded shop wearing my tux and suede shoes. This cozily
air-conditioned place with quiet strangers on other tables, smiling waiters and
shy cashiers who have noticed me for quite sometime, and hopeless romantic love
songs on the DJ-less radio every now and then, is the only place, in the heart of
the metro, which still reminds me of my soul-searching in progress. I stare down at the laptop I brought beside
the newspaper folded on the edge of the round, wooden table. My thoughts scramble. It’s not like my work’s
that absurdly tiresome but there’s a part of me that wants to give up. I slouch
a bit and recklessly lean on the cuddling couch while I intentionally position
my face to be hit by the last rays of the sundown. I suddenly feel uncommitted
to the big, transitioning city outside. I take a deep sigh. When will I stop
feeling this?
I hear some recognizable footsteps
nearing the cashier not so far from behind my couch. My mind begins to drift
away but a voice that I used to love hearing pulls me back to my senses.
“Can I have two cups of mocha?” Her
tone makes me stifle, panic and widen my eyes in unison.
“Yes, I’ll be taking them out,” she
adds.
I close my eyes for a while and pray
hard that the woman inside my head isn’t the same woman who is standing behind
me now. I turn my head around as slowly as I never did my whole life. Purple
high-heels. Knee-high executive skirt. Black and white office long-sleeves with
leather blazer. Insanely straight, pitch black hair. White rose cheeks.
Tempting eyelashes. Her stance is entirely different but her face still remains
the same. She glimpses on my side and catches both two of my half-victorious,
half-shocked eyes. I never saw this coming.
“Hey!”
She speaks so naturally as she manages a smile I’ve always dreamt of seeing
again. I feel a short-lived squeeze inside of me. There’s no denying it, my
soul is panicking.
I throw her back the same word but in
a slightly awkward manner. How can I not? When you finally see someone who has
never failed to cross mind for the last eight years of your life, wouldn’t you
be awkward? Awkward is an understatement.
I am actually shaking, my hands are trembling. The last time we saw each
other was when I told her that I didn’t love her anymore. I can’t remember the
look on her face at that moment. When I saw her tears fall on the floor, my
eyes never left the space between her feet and those tears. The truth however
was that I just didn’t have the courage to tell her that I was scared I
couldn’t put up a fight for her. I didn’t look up when she walked away not just
because I was afraid of her leaving me. I was more afraid that I wouldn’t be
able to move on. And I was right.
She then slowly walks towards me. My
senses melt down. My spirit wants to break away. I try to swallow down the
anxiety that is filling my throat while she comes near.
“Eight
years and you still look pretty the same,” she casually comments as she walks
around my couch. Words hover at the roof of my mouth for a second before I ask
her to sit down on the couch next to me.
My first question is not exactly the
same with the one I had been trying to concoct inside my minds moments ago, “So what brings you here in this city?”
She chuckles like a naive baby before
she answers, “What brings me here in this
city? Are you kidding me? This city called me to be here.” Her humor is
still irresistible. She then reveals that the headquarters of her company
relocated here a month ago and along with that was her work.
“And
you? Where do you work here?” she asks me directly while she inclines her
head involuntarily.
“Not
far from this coffee shop. I work in an Audit Firm nearby. Been employed for
over four years. It’s an interesting job, really.” I quip without second
thoughts.
“Oh. Auditor! What else would you
have been? So you’re really living up your dreams now. I always knew you
would.” She smiles as looks at me straight in the eyes while she drops this
line with a selfless tone.
Then I punch a line out of nowhere. “You know, I really missed you.” I lift
up my cup of latte. I can see her stare closely at the cup near my lips. “I’m sorry for the last time. I hope I could
make it up. The lost time?” I continue. As I put the cup back down on the
table, the sunrays are now hitting her face. I am once again reminded why I
fell in love with this woman. There is a shiver that strikes my entire system
inside but I am so contained at this very moment that I feel unexplainably
empty.
I notice her clench her bag then she looks
even more serious at me. She takes a deep breath and slowly beams before
saying, “You know, when you didn’t bother
asking me to stay when I was leaving, I realized one thing. You weren’t afraid
of losing me. You were afraid of yourself. But after all these years, you
shouldn’t worry, I have long forgiven you.”
These words take their turns in
pinching my heart with invisible, pointed objects and pulling them thereafter.
A moment of long silence filled with almost fading memories of morning laughter,
childish breakups, serious apologies and sweet forgiveness sweeps the little
sanity that once flooded my head. Have I really been afraid of myself? At the back of
my mind, something tells me that all I ever wanted is to remind her now of the
dreams we both made and the future we both wanted to have. But it seems
everything is falling off the edge of what is left between the two of us.
I recompose myself. “Again, I’m sorry. I wish I could turn back the
time. If only…” I tell her wholeheartedly now but she hushes me and signals
me to stop talking for a moment by raising her point finger. Her head wobbles
as if she is anticipating for something to come or someone to arrive.
“Your coffee’s here?” I ask her. But
then she just shakes her head.
“No.
My husband and my daughter are here.” She tells me with an expression I
last saw when I told her that we would be breaking up.
I refuse to look at my back. But when
I see the sparkle of her smile, I finally turn my head. I see a man, perhaps just
as tall as I am, carrying a pretty little girl with a pink dress and a cute
white, feathery headband. Her father drops her off and she rushes to her
mother. After what seems to be a century-deprived embrace, the little girl is
lifted into her mother’s arms. This little lady resembles some eyes I used to
stare, nose I used to pinch and cheeks I used to lay my tender kiss upon. This
little lady is the exact little version of the woman who was once mine.
“Who
is he, Mommy?” the little girl asks while she clutches her teddy bear
looking at her mother.
“He’s
an old friend from College, baby.” She tells her baby while she smiles
back.
“How…
How old is she?” I stutter as I try not to think about what or how I feel
about this.
“I
am four years old. What’s your name?” the little girl responds to me in a
mature-sounding voice.
“Honey,
I think we have to go.” The man who carried the little girl approaches us
now and takes the kid back in his arms.
“My
husband,” she points out to him. Her husband shakes my hand. I am about to
say that it is nice to meet him but he suddenly says something that even
surprises me more.
“I
know who you are. It’s good that I have finally met you” her husband speaks
in a refined tone reflecting how he wears his suit and tie. I am about to say
the same to him but I decide to offer him back a smile. It’s the least I think
I can do.
“My
coffees are here. See you soon,” she tells me while they walk away from my
couch. I smile. But while they walk away, I bow down slowly like I did at that
last moment with her in college. I look down on the floor and this time, it’s
my tears that I am about to see on the floor.
Wiping out my watery eyes, I look at
them while they head out of the door. The husband opens the door. The little
girl looks back at me and waves goodbye. And lastly, that very woman smiles at
me as she slowly taps her husband’s back and squeezes her daughter’s tiny nose.
Just like that. They are gone. It’s
true that when you care so much about some things, they stay with you. Since I
still care so much but it was too late, she is gone.
I sit back down. I try to reinvent
myself and recall every little thing that happened minutes ago. The way she
looked, the way she spoke, the way she answered my question, and that moment
when she knew that I would see her new family – all these images play like a hesitant
slideshow inside my head. When I look outside, the sun has already gone down.
Moments later, I have been closing my
eyes in contemplation when another woman comes. She rolls her arms around my
neck then lays a kiss in my right cheek to surprise me. She asks me to move aside
so she can sit beside me. This woman right here has some qualities with the
woman I was talking with minutes ago. This may have been the reason why I like
her. But before I do or say something else, I try to kiss back this woman - my
fiancée.
I roll the engagement ring in my
finger and look at her closely.
“Honey,
there’s something you need to know”, I am about to start a very long
explanation and confession. This time, I promise, there are no more lies.#
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