I once loved a man who contemplated his reflection on graduation day, mortarboard perched on his wavy brown hair, letting his eyes well up with pride as he wrapped his arms around my complacent midsection. A healthy observer may have been touched by our closeness on such a momentous morning, but when my gaze searched our spotty reflection for some small, shared warmth, I felt a twinge when the only eyes that locked were his own green irises.
Several curling iron burns and subdued panic attacks later, I am folded into a sea of anxious, alcohol-reeking, sweaty, bellowing classmates. A dark part of me wonders if holding his hand in the midst of the fray will forever color my recollections of this overblown occasion. When our indulgent graduation speaker quoted the encouraging lines of a pop song to inflate our already-bloated senses of worth, I notice how he chuckles sincerely in all of the right places. The chirping words of our student body president send detectable strains of emotion through his features, and I conclude that he reassures his own predictability with the swells of a heroic orchestra in his head.
No matter that these are the prejudiced observations of a girl recently jilted. Are each of us not guilty of being the main players in the tragic, Shakespearean screenplays of our lives?
Life carried on. Boxes were packed, goodbyes were said to friends and family. I parked my ass at the least threatening city on the golden coast, using vague adjacency to declare my commitment to words intimately spoken. I walked the marble-lined hallways of the ostentatious, beautiful beacon of wealth that was his childhood home with a wistfulness that I wish I could yank from memory.
Alas, my walk-on role was cut short. Killed off. Written out of the script. This resulted in his screenplay taking a turn for the existential while my own became pitchy and irritatingly melancholic. The ideologies of a starry-eyed, art student coupling could only last as long as the euphemisms of art school critiques rang true.
I will miss your sweet optimism.
