Hiraeth Blossoms Over Sweet Coffee

“You still love her?”

Before me, there’s you. Your woollen hands wrap loosely around a steaming coffee, warming beneath the knitted sage gloves you’ve had since before we met. Only a few bobbles line the wrist where your coat rubs against the fabric.  Your face is flushed slightly pink, lit up as beams of sun glow against your pale skin. It reaches out and wraps around your cheeks like a soft spotlight, smearing your outline, which blurs into the background like an unfinished painting.

The irradiance of the morning sun reflects in your eyes. The colour lies behind a veil of lost moments, a colour I never thought I’d forget.

“I never said that.” The words come out of my mouth like air through a dusty filter, dry and hot.

“You didn’t have to.” Those eyes soften, upturned and brimming; you could always see right through me.

My own coffee sits below me, steaming with fresh heat. I let the suffocating warmth of the vapour engulf my chin, welcoming the relief to my shivering skin. My hands wrap around the mug, but only a for a time. It’s like a little game. After a few seconds, they begin to boil, so I remove them until the cold seeps through my fingers and the numbness sets in. Until I crave the heat again.

“Maybe I never got over what happened,” it comes out a whisper, a stunted growth of words that tumble out before they can cook.

“And maybe you never will.” A comforting smile blossoms, unfazed by the finality of such an idea.

Taking a deep breath, my hands cling to the white, hot mug so tight I’m surprised it didn’t shatter under the pressure. There’s a disruption in the liquid, tiny waves rippling across the surface like a barely contained ocean, but small and insignificant, all the same. I meet with your eyes again, which fade as I try to pick out the details. I focus so hard that it starts to feel silly, a concentration that forgets the flow of conversation and leaves us floating in unsaid words. But words prickle at the mind like pins on a board, defined, black ink on white paper. Images are what I want to remember, the ones that are hazy and filtered through the rays of the morning sun. I want to preserve them in my brain like a carefully dried rose in a well-used book so I can flick through the pages and relive them, even as the years pave them away.

Memories, though, aren’t like that. They’re gentle trickles of water against stone. So delicate, only centuries of carving with their soft touch could dent the shape of something so unyielding. We don’t have that long.

To imprint your eyes into my mind, a stamp of recognition, would be to obtain more power than one human could deserve.

“I’m scared that you might be right. Part of me wants to forget.” My leg starts jigging under the table and the rhythmic tap of my shoe against the floor grounds me, reminds me that some part of this is real.

Then, you catch me by surprise.

You laugh.

The corners of your mouth twitch up and your eyes crease into little semi circles, the kind I’d draw on a smiley face at the end of a love note. Your gloved hand rises to cover your mouth, hiding it from my view. Only your eyes remain.

“I’m really sorry,” you giggle lightly. There’s a moment of quiet as your laughter fades, leaving only a bemused smile in its wake. “What a funny concept. Forgetting would be silly!” There’s a bright tone to your voice, and as you grow more at ease, I shrink into myself.

“But why? What’s so silly about ridding hurt from the source?”

The sun fades away, leaving my vision to grow dark as it adjusts to the new brightness. “It’s quite entitled of you to believe that you deserve a pain-free existence.” Your hand reaches for the long metal spoon beside your coffee and lifts it with a little twang as the end brushes against the ceramic mug. “Pain drives us to change what needs to be changed. You’re the best version of yourself because you decided that you didn’t want to face that pain again.” It’s as if you hold all the secrets to my emotions, like you’ve felt every feeling ever felt before, and you know the drill. You know it all. The expression you so carefully hold shows that you knew how this was going to go before we even sat down. The metal spoon spins under your fingers as you twist it, round and round. It dances with the energy of your touch.

“No, that’s just not true. I grew because I never wanted to hurt someone like that again.” My face tightens and I realise my jaw is clenched. I remind myself to keep it loose.

“Well, you wouldn’t have cared to change if it didn’t make you feel bad. Therefore, it was the pain you felt as a consequence of the pain you caused. It can get a bit complicated if you try to look further than that.” My gaze drifts to the window beside us, and I start to realise the street looks empty. If it even is a street. It’s more of a white abyss. “It’s okay, that’s what it means to be human. We do things that make us feel good, and we don’t do what makes us feel bad.” I can smell the coffee on your words as they drift across the table. They replay in my mind like a catchy song, one that twists in my chest.

You pick up your mug and bring it to your face, the redness spreading across it like a flurry of pink at the heat of the liquid. And you put it down again.

“Are you okay?”

I think about this for a second. The world outside is so bright. But your face is so soft, and it glows in the same way it did, before.

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’m a better person than I was,” the words catch. My throat aches and my eyes burn. Everything is okay.

I am okay.

I focus on controlling my tone as the words force their way out, slowly, and quietly.

“What if it was all for nothing?”

Breathe.

“Nothing is truly nothing. The fact you’re even here says it wasn’t.” Your voice reminds me of the vanilla essence we used to pour into cakes, as smooth as it smells, the moment before the liquid touches your lips for the first time. What you are now is forever essence in concept.

“Do you think I’m… better?” I choke out, my voice thick and my throat coated in honey. There’s a spot of coffee drying on the table, the surface shiny as it hardens. I know that if my hand reached out, I would feel its sticky sugariness melding to my skin. Sugary, because you always have heaps of it in your coffee. You never did like bitterness.

“What do you want me to say? This is all for you. Nothing I say will change anything.” You put down your mug, placing it back in the circle of coffee that reminds me that it once overflowed. It hollowly knocks against the wood.

“What now?” My heart is suddenly beating in doubles, knocking against my chest with its fists and demanding to be known. I wonder if you hear it too.

“Well, I should probably go soon. Sitting in a coffee shop with no coffee sounds like the end of an adventure. Or maybe the absence of a beginning.” You giggle again, but I sit on this side of the table, unable to find the joke. Maybe I’m too far away.

“I know I can never see you again. Not really, anyway. I sometimes think about what it would be like…” I trail off.

“Look,” you start. Your elbows appear above the table, and you rest against them, leaning forward. “That’s your biggest problem. There’s this whole past behind you, done and dusted. An old record. But you keep replaying it, editing it, as if it’s your record to alter. As if you’re the one who wrote it and you’re the one who holds the power to change it. That’s not how the past works. That record doesn’t belong to you. Once it exists, it exists in that form forever. You’re so stuck up on a record that already exists and you’re turning a blind eye to what’s being written right now.” There’s a flush of frustration, and I almost see who you are.

“Find something else to do. You hurt me. You can’t take that back and you can’t change it. And I can’t either. I don’t care to; I have a life. One you’re not in anymore. Yet my future is still being written all the same. Take what you will from what was, but I’ll never see your efforts. Your future doesn’t exist in mine, neither mine in yours. What’s gone is gone.” There’s a steady tone to your voice, and hollowness. I look back to the empty coffee mug, and you reach to the floor to grab a lilac purple bag, the same one you wore on the last day I saw you.

“Please, move on. There’s nothing to redeem, nothing to forgive. What happened means nothing to me anymore. All of my futures since then have piled up on top of us like pages of an ongoing book. I don’t waste my time reading the first page.” A squeak emanates through the room as you push your chair out, its legs scraping against the floor. And then you stand. “You stopped writing the day I left. There’s still time to start again. One day, the pages will overflow, and a flimsy little page like this will crumble under the weight. There’s no honour in rereading the same page, as if to prove you’re sorry for writing a bad chapter. Write a better chapter. Move on.”

The smile falls weak, a ghost of what was once there.

“Goodbye.”

And you go, rounding the corner. Your boots click against the floor, the ones you bought when I first met you. They trail off, and you disappear. You’re gone.

You’re gone.

The empty coffee mug you left behind sits cold on the table. My own has gone cold, leaving my fingertips chilly against the morning air. It’s half-full.

I drink the rest and leave.

< 99% baked >

Someone I used to know.