What if it doesn't come at all?

by

“Well, it was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, they meant we were supposed to be together. I knew it the very first time I touched her. I was just taking her hand to help her out of a car and I knew. It was like… magic.”

-Sam Baldwin
There’d been thousands of stories in her head. If a story was a single thread, there’d be a web and her mind was the spider, spindling in the middle. No matter how different or long or difficult each stories went, she spindled all of it with the constant amount of hope and they still end up with the same words. They lived happily ever after…The stories never left her head. It was still there. But, somehow, without her knowing, the usual light of hope had been gone. Her mind stopped spindling. The words stopped coming. Only the stories of the past had remained, none of the future had been worded. Hope was gone. It was as if she finally realized she will never set foot on such perfect romantic story. And, for the record, she actually never did.

“They’re all magical. They are all something. I always feel something. How will I be able to tell the difference?” she asked, looking deeply into the eyes in front of hers, the eyes in the mirror, her eyes, as if the answers lie there.

“If they are all the same, they’re all magical, it’s not magic. Not yet,” she said to herself, in a voice less alarmed than the first one she’d used. “Aren’t you grateful? You’re seeing the world in such a positive light, seeing as you consider every little thing, even just a single ‘hello,’ a spark that could start a fire that’ll burn bright deep inside your chest. Which is quite true.” She smiled comfortingly. “Every spark can start a fire,” she added, thoughtfully.

“Yes, they all can. But in the proper place and time!” she exclaimed, pulling a look of incredulity on her face. Her reflection in the mirror does the same. “A spark that started in the middle of a winter night will eventually die off unless it’s thrown to a fireplace with woods or perhaps, to a spilled gasoline. And that’s my problem right now. It seems like my mind doesn’t know when a spark could ablaze into a fire. One spark then my mind goes off writing its own fairytale. I mean, come on, it’s just his skin brushing mine because it’s awfully crowded in this train! We don’t even know each other.”

“Your time will come,” she countered to herself, “It will come.”
She stared hard at the mirror, discerning every part of her face she could insult, losing herself in the thought of dying alone, of never finding anyone who thinks she’s good enough, and said softly to herself, “What if it doesn’t come, at all?”

That night she went out to eat in a fancy restaurant, alone. Somehow her mind keeps on focusing on that word: alone. People said she didn’t know how it felt. She’s just a kid. A selfish teenager. But they have no right to tell her that. They haven’t been in her place.

When she returned the menu to the waiter, their fingers brushed. She looked up and saw that the waiter was young, probably older for a year or two, but definitely young. She smiled. Then her mind went off again, adding another string in her head. Different start, same ending. This time though, aside from the warm hope, another thing is present in her mind. The cold sadness.

That girl is me.