Remember?

Four years is a long time.

She told me to my face that we never had a chance, but her avoiding eyes were never meant for lying. People outside the cafe moved about, like a flowing river that served as her only diversion from the ugly truth. I remember her lips slightly trembling, I remember every damning minute and detail of it all, as though her very actions spoke to me that day, that if she, if we, could've tried harder to just stop our busy lives and listen to what we both had kept so often to ourselves, that we would not be in that coffeeshop and not be talking about the end.


We were both civil about things. I, for the most part, felt that it was the last thing I could do for her as a boyfriend. I openly admitted that I had been too busy for work and that she had her needs that I willfully neglected in providing. All those raincheck dinners, canceled dates, missed calls. It was clear whose fault it was. I didn't even make excuses. The coming of another person in our relationship was more of a consequence than a cause, and the silence between me and her was a testament to that fact. I touched her cheek, she looked at me again. "If in the future," she told me in a fidgeting unsure tone, "we still don't find what we are looking for, please know that I'm willing to give this, us, a chance again."

I touch her arms once and shook my head once. Her face paled and she finally shed long abated tears, not because we broke something special, but because it was lost long before we could ever strain it hard enough to break, and that there was no turning things back as much as she wished she could, for broken things could be mended, but lost things were rarely ever found again.

For the rest of our stay there we just sat silently in front of each other, on opposite chairs, about as far as we were when we first went out, and perhaps as close as we would ever get again.

We kept our feelings jarred inside up to the last moment, too dignified, too proud, and too damned to show each other how weak we were. Ah, those times. It was such a tragedy, like a party ending without the fireworks.

For we both thought things would end with a bang, but horrified at the eventuality that died with a passing whimper.

Like most good things.