She told me that she didn’t believe in love.
I found this hard to believe because the Beatles had convinced me that it is all that we need. I had first heard of her through a friend who struggled to find words of meaning and instead sufficed for cheap laughs and empty spaces.
After being stuck somewhere between Philadelphia and Hanover, with brief trips to Jerusalem, we finally crossed paths. And when I saw her standing there, the gaze from her emerald eyes had sent me searching for the same words which my friend had struggled with.
I spent the majority of our time together thinking of clever lines as she sipped on a cherry Pepsi, fooling everyone who was a fool for her. But like the fool who failed to play it cool, the brief moment that we did share left me hanging off a cliff. There was something in the way she moved which attracted me like no other.
Our ease and mutual understanding made that ordinary porch feel like a strawberry field. Made me feel like I wasn’t alone in what felt like a crowd full of strangers.
But eventually, I traded her emerald gaze for the glare of blue iPhone read receipts and conversations for texts which could have easily been forgotten. Effortless in a different sense, I suppose. This isn’t to disregard some of our moments which felt larger than life. But somehow, the closer we seemed to get, the more we seemed to distance ourselves from each other.
Did we run the risk of talking until we couldn’t go on? Ignoring the chance that we may fall apart before too long?
Like a castaway, looking at my phone as if it were a compass that gave me no direction. Man overboard! Jumped into a sea of unanswered questions and unresolved emotions.
So tell me Jude, does letting her into your heart and under your skin make it better? Or is it just that the long and winding road may not lead to her door?