Cliché
She came to me and cried. We were young, our lives ahead of us. I knew
nothing that could make her cry this way. I can't (won't?) remember
just what she said. Only the meaning. There was someone else, and
something about him scared her, but he had asked her to marry him
already. (How "already" was it?)
She knew him from work. But we knew
each other in the ways that matter. Was it because she needed so badly
to escape her parents?
I was navigating by the stars, dead-set on my course towards the
future, my college degree, and then maybe marriage. But not before.
She was the siren, or the passing ship with a running light, since she
never did call to me to run aground. She reached a safe harbor I could
not provide. But she had been more than enough to set my gyroscope
a-spinning out of control, and then to be gone?
It threw me. I didn't have a thing to say. Or maybe I said "It's OK"
because she was crying. What a lie. I hadn't learned to stand up for
myself, and what I wanted. Maybe that's all it would have taken. Maybe
it was better this way. We never know, do we?
go to Tom's home page
Cliff hang
Index to other writing