“Do you want to come back here next week?,” I asked her.
“Of course,” she said. I agreed. It was a nice restaurant, nice food, nice scenery, but that wasn’t why I agreed. And I knew, and rejoiced in the fact, it wasn’t why she did, either.
We’d see each other again, intermittently, before then, but it was nice to see each other in a more solid way, and see other things like flowers and gorgeous slivers of moon and those lovely eyes, but mostly to see each other.
Love; what would we be without it?
Before we parted ways, we stared at the moon.
“Isn’t the moon beautiful tonight?,” she asked, and I joked about it in the way one can only joke about very valuable things, but in the end I agreed, because it really was beautiful.
I wondered how difficult love would be if we didn’t have it. It would be a lonely country, I thought, that did not have a moon, or roses, or chocolate, or those other lovely things which are not quite love, but not really not love.
The next day, I received an empty love letter from her; I didn’t believe it at first, thought there must be something in the envelope, but opening it was enough to reveal that it was, indeed, empty.
Huh. No use jumping to conclusions. I’ll just ask her about it next time I see her.
She had the same question for me; she, too, had received an empty envelope.
“Do you remember what it said?,” she asked.
“Not… exactly,” I said sheepishly.
“Same here,” she said.
And I bought her some chocolate, and we sat under a tree, and we did not think any more about it, for we had more important things to think about, things that were right beside us.
We were back in the restaurant, the same one we had been in before.
“Isn’t the moon beautiful tonight?,” I asked, and meant something more constant and more beautiful than the moon. It is an old way of talking about love, and like most old things it never gets old.
The food wasn’t very good. But we had other ways of using our mouths, and those entertained us instead, with sweet words and other sweeter things. I had gotten her flowers, roses, red in the way we think of love as being red. I looked at the reflections in her eyes and saw them as tiny colorless shapes, and was somehow displeased.
But I had other reasons to look at her eyes, as well, which more than made up for it.
“Do you want to come back here next week?,” I asked her, once we had left.
“Of course,” she said.
I spat out the chocolate she had given me the night before. It was oddly tasteless, in a nasty way. It shouldn’t be, as it’s the same one she buys every time, but it was. Maybe I had a fever.
But I didn’t, you know.
The table was bare; the tree was bare; our words were bare, and matter-of-fact. Maybe she needed sleep.
But she didn’t, you know.
The food was still bad. I looked at her and found it hard to focus on her face; it was not there; someone else was using it, some other pretty lady who lived in the land where there were no chocolate boxes or roses; she had received it as a gift from a loving man, or taken it herself to delight him.
No eyes looked at me lovingly; no eyes looked at her, in wonder or at all.
We had no faces to hide behind; we had no chocolate or roses to give; we had no nice words or hands to extend to each other. All we had were each other.
“Do you want to come back next week?,” I asked, tucking away my wallet.
She stared at the place where the new moon used to be, an emptiness studded with stars. She knew its position like she knew the hand that used to be there for holding.
“Not really,” she said.
“Me neither.”