Little white lies

Yesterday’s Dreams

I had been sitting on the window sill, listening to the hail pound menacingly against the building. Watching it accumulate like snow on the brooding shoreline. It was maddening, the sound echoed in my head. The melancholy atmosphere was ever so fitting with my mood. For just as the once bright sky turned to black, so had my hopes and dreams. How could I have thought this would turn out any other way? Long distance relationships never work, why did we try to fool ourselves?

After an eleven hour drive from our old Kentucky home, we arrive in Wilmington North Carolina. My friend and I were on a week long visit to see an old friend. We rush out of the car to find her waiting to greet us. She had people over her apartment to meet us. Of one of them was the most enchanting man, he had long flowing blonde hair, his skin was golden and eyes green as jade. He must have caught my gaze because he walked straight toward me, took my hand in his, knelt to the ground and said “Other men said they have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.”  by G. Moore. From that moment on, for the remainder of the trip we were inseparable. There was never a lull in the conversation; we talked about for hours on end hanging on every word. But then our time was up, I had to return to Kentucky. We continued to communicate through email/phone/webcam for a few months. Until one night, we had been drinking wine and trying to figure out the logistics for who would fly out to see who next when he asked me to run away with him to Italy. At first I laughed it off and blamed it on the Merlot but he was serious. I was swept away in the whirlwind of the moment and agreed. I flew out to Wilmington two days later, we had decided to leave as soon as possible. When I arrived, he presented me with a silver ring with a gold circle in the center and asked if I would be his. I joyously accepted. From there we went out for dinner on the boardwalk. I stopped in a shop while he was parking the car and bought a ring to give to him. After dinner we went to watch the sun set on the beach, we stayed for hours. He sang Sinatra, while we danced in the moonlit sand. When the song came to an end and we stop dancing we sat in the sand to gazed out into the ocean. I pulled out the ring that I had ever so slyly purchased without him knowing and repeated the question that he had asked me earlier that day. He paused, staring blankly at the soft rolling waves. This took me completely by surprise, just moments before we had seemed so sure. He softly replied no, and got up to walk away. I went after him asking what had changed. His only response that we were setting ourselves up for imminent failure and that he couldn’t bear to see me hurt. I didn’t bother expressing that the stabbing pain in my chest from the shock was one of the deepest pains I had experienced to that day. We had the type of romance one reads about in novels. Like a novel I flip through the memories like pages, remembering  a patch of blue in the stormy sky.