I am driving through the woods, past my past, toward my future. The road turns and I'm at odds with oncoming traffic again, watching as the other drivers roll sedately past me on the way to anywhere but here. It's a big white car and the interior looks red. My heart speeds up and my stomach contracts and I surreptitiously glance through the windshield, through the driver's side window in that split second before it's too far past me to be able to see anymore.
it's not him
it is never him
I live in constant fear that it will be.
I live in constant fear that it won't be.
No, this isn't love. This is just the echoes of what we called love when we were young and alone and needed something we could control. This is the fear that he will see me and think there's still a chance. This is the remorse from years of things I didn't say and things I never accepted his apologies for. He did try to apologize. Or maybe it was his way of giving up trying.
Here is an excuse for all my mistakes. I haven't grown up, but I'd like to pretend that I have. As proof, I offer you my career, my wife, and my drinking habits. But I haven't grown up, haven't changed my ways since we were young and dumb and ruining our lives.
As proof, I offer you my unborn child.
Sitting in a restaurant with my best friend and my little sister and all my memories of things we did in years gone by, staring down the barrel of our collective histories, I find the questions remain much the same. My old teacher and my friend's new colleague, one and the same, asks us when their baby is due. I wonder if she knows that he and I dated, that I left, and he stayed, and the life that baby is being born in to. Because we do. I do. The knowledge settles on me and I wonder if it quiets me and if everyone else hears that silence. I wonder if they ignore it, as I would, for politeness' sake. This is something that teacher would never understand. This is something we all know. Chips and salsa wash that particular retort out of my mouth.
So as I'm peeking in to another Le Sabre, it hits me, like it did those nights lying in bed talking with words hushed by emotion and hope. I am in vet school, becoming a doctor. He is married and having a child. We are both exactly where we wanted to be at this point in our lives. I wonder if he is happy with it.
I wonder if I am.
I let the cars roll by. I look in the windows, but I never look in the rear-view mirror.