He left me. It was not a bitter parting, but a little dry. I had loved him and I felt like I deserved more. I thought that he would pour out his feelings like a patient who spills everything out to his therapist. And the therapist feels accomplished and lets him go. I, however, was nowhere near accomplished. I had failed to state my feelings. I had only succeeded in writing them in pure fiction. The danger of fiction is that people might not believe you in the end because they assume that you really don’t mean what you say.
If I were to re-write what happened that day in a form of fiction, I would write that before he left my apartment, I yelled out that I had been in love with him. I would write that I yelled it out and that he stopped and came back up the stairs. He then stood there and said with a big smile,
“I’ll be here for a couple of days. You busy tomorrow?”
And then after that I would write that somehow we connected and spent time together.
But of course since I don’t believe in happy endings, the ones that leave readers hopeful and make them too satisfied, I would say that we spent some time together, but then he went back to his quiet Georgia town. He went back and he owed me nothing. I stayed where I was and wrote because someone had told me to write. We lived our separate lives and always thought of one another.
But I did not and would not re-write what happened because what happened was simply perfect on its own. Some things must stay in a writer’s head, fiction or not.
The end.