They spend the next two years struggling through various roadblocks, both mental and physical, in efforts to avoid the inevitable conclusion. The audience watches with bated breath, eager for the protagonists to find each other and live happily ever after. Sidestepping all the easy fixes, our story travels the paradigm and we arrive exactly where we are expected.
In the morning, we were potential. Three hundred miles later, we find ourselves holding each other in a bus station in New York City.
This is our Hollywood moment.
Fade out, roll credits.
As a reunion, this is where our story ends.
The couple finds themselves embracing once again, all is right in the world and we can continue on with our lives while the Grips take their bows. But after the credits roll, life continues, adding new pages to the script with every minute that passes. And the question remains: how to boil it all down so it makes sense?
In truth, nothing makes any more sense today then it did three weeks ago. Nothing has been decided, nothing new discovered, but the story continues to evolve, even beyond this moment. I try to wrap words around this thing as it happens, and I only find a convoluted knot for my efforts.
It�s the peril of the writer�s mindset. How can you quantify something that isn�t past-tense? How can you live a story when you don�t know where it�s going? When you look at the world through a literary filter, uncertainty becomes more frightening then failure.
Epilogue.
After the credits rolled, we spent the weekend in bed, tossing and turning and whispering to each other, braving the daylight only for the sake of food and hygiene. We explored every wet morsel our minds and bodies had to offer, all the while feigning ignorance of a looming departure.
We walked down Bedford and every boy turned and looked as she passed.
Despite my efforts to illuminate her ego, she is painfully ignorant of her own radiance. When she does notice people staring at her, she assumes malice rather then envy, disapproval rather then attraction.
She told me how ugly she is in the morning as I stared at her with lust and appreciation. She told me how fat she is, and my hands disagreed with every touch.
In a random bagel shop, an English casting agent courted her for a Levi�s commercial. She brushed it off, saying that she probably wouldn�t be in town.
Somehow, despite all the glaring evidence and my endless protests, she still denies her beauty.
When Sunday finally came, we sat in bed together, unable to deny the fact of her departure any longer. Her tears soaking my sheets, mine, wetting the pillow. She asked for a parting gift to accompany the small collection of souvenirs she�d collected over the course of the weekend. One of my tee shits, preferably worn already, so that she could remember my smell.
For the first time in my life, I literally gave someone the shirt off my back.
There in the greyhound station, we found ourselves embracing again, as if the weekend had barely even happened. We waited in line together, hand in hand as tears silently dripped from her eyes, and at the gate I held her once more and kissed her as she cried.
The conductor laughed and said, �Honey, he ain�t goin� off to war. You gonna see him again.�
She forced a smile with tears in her eyes, and I watched through the window as she boarded. Standing there, we both stared at each other through the windows of the bus, like some sad zoo exhibit detailing the emotional rigors of parting.
She, the puppy-eyed girl getting shipped back to Baltimore, and me with my face pressed against the glass between us, trying so hard to find a way to bridge that divide.
Every look just seemed to say: don�t you want to stay?
