Untitled/Unfinished

A Story by Logan Marbury

This is the beginning of a short story chronicling the passion and hopelessness of young love.

The sun had crept from behind the cold grayness to expose his quiet desperation. How he despised it. There is something wonderfully melodic when one’s mood becomes synchronous with the weather, and when that synchronicity is broken, life becomes discordant for a time. It was his misfortune to experience this lack of harmony now, when all his life’s problems had begun to roar together in a perpetual, cacophonous din that threatened at any moment to deafen him completely. He found some respite in momentary distraction whether it was at the bottom of a bottle or in her arms. He didn’t fancy thinking of her as frequently as he was wont to. It could only end poorly. He knew this, and yet he could not stay away. Perhaps he wanted to be miserable, perhaps he was meant to be. In any case, he couldn’t stay away. It would only end poorly.

He did his best not to dwell on it, and, when he succeeded, he found his mind wandering all manner of places. Most frequently, he saw himself. He was twenty-something, still handsome, but thinner, more disheveled. One could see the tiredness etched into the lines surrounding his bloodshot eyes. He carried a leather messenger bag hurriedly through a slate-gray maze of streets in a nameless city. His hair was long, his days were longer. It was a romantic portrait of a carefully constructed future. His greatest hope was that he wasn’t alone in it. He wanted to fall madly and desperately in love with a girl as hopelessly idealistic and as hopeless as he was. Some days he thought of meeting her in a café somewhere in Europe. Paris, maybe. She would be sitting outside on a delightfully dreary day, her nose buried in some book that would catch his eye. He would wander outside without having waited for his usual black coffee and ask, simply, “Do you like it, madam?” and she would start and look up with eyes that shone straight through him and that spoke solely in that long-forgotten tongue of extravagant emotion.

“Pardon?”

And it would be over. He could see it, had already seen it thousands of times, clear as the finest crystal and farther from him than infinity.

Then he would think of her again, and everything would crumble before him.

She was a mystery to him. They had met early on " indeed she was the first person he had met there. He had seen her from some way off, standing slightly slouched the way she did and speaking on the phone. When he was still about 50 yards away, she hung up and took one step as if to leave and disappear forever into the night. But she hesitated, paralyzed for that one monumental moment. He often wondered why she stopped. Perhaps she’d forgotten something in her room and was on her way to retrieve it. Perhaps she’d seen him out of the corner of her eye and wished to meet him. In any case, she’d stopped, and he’d asked her for directions, and their lives were altered. This was just like him. It could only end poorly.

He was a poet, with a poet’s weakness for romance, and the whole thing was utterly saturated, dripping with romance. They spoke at length, dissecting each other one question at a time until they could both see clearly their own shattered insides reflected in the eyes of the other. And they knew. So one night, he slipped his arm around her slender waist and pressed her lips to his and told her everything she needed to know. And it was sealed, and it would only end poorly.