! It wasn’t raining. The sky wasn’t a dark mass of grey, and the breeze wasn’t blowing raindrops onto the glass of sombre terraces. There were no long shadows cast over darkened pavement by aging street lamps. You couldn’t hear the sound of a goods train passing over the brightly-painted iron bridge, which wasn’t playing host to a desperate busker, who was not strumming the chorus to ‘Wonderwall’ on his cheap guitar. There was no chill in the air, there were no whispered promises of Winter days to come, and there was no reason to bury your hands as deep into the pockets of your dampened coat as they could go, no need to cling to warmth. The road, which wasn’t a zoetrope of car headlights flashing by, did not hold promises of an expectation finally about to be met. There was no crudely-folded ticket squeezed into the weathered wallet between the tissues and the spare change. There was no need to hurry.
! She, however, was there. Although this time, she was not cowering under her violet umbrella, leaning against the rusted railings that now were polished and shining in the scattered sunlight of a mid-April morning. Hers was not a face to be recognised through blurred photos of a family outing, not this time. Her face was known, although some things were new. Everything changes, if you give it enough time, and although time always seemed in such short supply, it piled up behind you until you felt like you walked in its shadow. That was only too clear, especially today. Today was a day for Yesterday.
! She saw him coming, strolling around the corner with a small briefcase in his hand, and so she folded up the page from the newspaper, and cleared a space beside her on the bench, a half-smile on her face as she watched him approach over the paving stones.
! There was so much to say. Thousands of words, to come pouring out, powered by tidal waves of emotion. Questions, answers, and reflections. Perhaps if enough were said, and enough was heard, then time could be held at bay just for a moment, and it would be the same story again, even if the scenery would be different. Oh well, everything changes. However, change does not mean that what had once been was now lost forever. So many things to mention, so many feelings to share, so many wise musings to throw at each other like tennis players struggling to keep the ball in the court, above the net. So much to say.
! Thousands of words.
! They were both silent.
! Which is at it should be. He sat there, on the bench, facing a trio of pigeon scavengers hunting for dropped crisps, but not paying them any attention. Both of them stared ahead, at nothing in particular. There was no need to turn to her, not yet. They were lost in their thoughts, perhaps, although both of them had a map and knew where they were. They’d been here before.
! Afterwards, she’d typed up her experience in great detail. Back then, her voice was different, and her words bore a different colour. She had gone into such detail on things that later seemed blatantly obvious, and she had neglected the truly important things, because, well, there were some things that could never be conveyed through mere words. She’d tried, a few times, but it was like trying to play a rock song (perhaps ‘Wonderwall’ she thought; it’d be appropriate) on a triangle. No, she had written pages about the day, but what she brought with her this time was not printed copies of those paragraphs, those strange sentences that spoke to her with her own voice from a time long ago. Instead, she brought her memories, which, although faded and distorted as memories often are, were alive and burning with a flame that would have illuminated even that rainy day.
! “Hello, stranger” he murmured, at first speaking to the air, but then turning to her with a wide smile on his face that was not as warm as it pretended to be. He was half-joking, but the thing with half-jokes is that they are also half-truths, and to him now, she almost was a stranger, as he was to her.
“It’s been a while” she replied, shivering at the cold that wasn’t there.
! It had been a while. Time had passed by, rushing by, moment by moment, like a good train hurtling past, wagon by wagon. When had it really been, that October day, when he wandered around the corner with both hands in his pocket, his outline framed by the headlights of the passing cars driven by tired people heading home through the damp drizzle and the darkness? The darkness which was not matched by the excitement she had held at their meeting. A burst of colour in the monochrome blur of her life, back then. Life these days was a monochrome blur too. Maybe not everything changes, even though the circumstances were now all different.
! More silence.
! “I’m glad we could meet up again” he exclaimed. He meant it, although the ‘again’ felt wrong somehow. ‘Again’ seems to imply a repetition, a connection, but this meeting felt so different. He knew the way this time, and had had no reason to stop before the brightly-painted iron bridge to make sure he was going the right way. Reading her directions, copied down in shorthand on the back of a supermarket receipt. That, however, was one of the small differences. So much had changed now. Even the supermarket the receipt was from had closed down, and a new one had opened in its place, with half-price offers but none of the familiarity of the old one.
! “Me too” she remarked. “I know we don’t get to talk so much these days, but since the opportunity arose…” She left the sentence unfinished. She wasn’t sure she could finish it. They didn’t talk much these days, that was true. It wasn’t because they couldn’t. Things were just different now. His e-mail address was no longer the cutesy one that she had memorised, once. Now it was cultured, a combination of academic terminology and a lesser character from one of the Discworld novels. Her e-mail had also changed. Three times. Each time, trying to match the person she felt she was, and whilst none of them were not true, they no longer seemed as true as when she had typed them, happily donning her contemporary identity like a new coat, one without crumpled tickets in the pockets.
! “I’m still glad we get to talk, though” he admitted, unnecessarily. He knew she knew. When he talked to her, it was as if a shadow of who he had once been was talking to a shadow of the girl he had once known. In their conversations, there were hints, whispers, of back then, and the hopes and dreams that belonged there. The same hopes and dreams that seemed hollow and brittle in the brighter light of the present. Cute, but dated.
! “Even if we no longer stay up until midnight, eagerly discussing all those things we had in common” she grinned. It’s funny how much you have in common with almost anyone, but back then, it had seemed as if two butterflies had recognised their own pattern in each other’s wings. Maybe, they had thought, they were going to be the ones to save each other. She looks back on it and she smiles, even though there is sadness there. It was so long ago now, before the exams, before the cafes, before the world grew larger and pulled them both apart in different directions. Even midnight had a different meaning these days. So much has changed.
! “Even if the future turned out so different to how we’d hoped” he mused. It had. Oh, how it had. He had been naïve to ever believe it would have gone the way it had gone in their plans. Perhaps he had never believed it. The future always seems a lot safer when you have a vision to cling to. He could not have known, back then, that those things would have happened. Shocks, surprises. Plot twists without narrative structure to offer hints as to where things were heading. Situation to situation, until those aging street lights had been long since replaced with lamplight and flickering screens.
! “Isn’t that how it always goes?” she sighed. Yes. It always goes. Any moment, any place, stop and look around you, drink in everything with all your senses and all your heart, and hold fast to it, for it will not last. She remembered when they had had to part. She turned to head back home for supper, to write up her most pressing thoughts and feelings. He had turned too, disappearing into the dark drizzle to return to his world. A world that was now as lost as that supper had been. Her suppers these days usually came from the microwave. There never seemed time to properly cook anything substantial. There never seemed enough time for anything, really.
! They had so much to say.
Some of it was said. Most of it was not, but then, most of it never needed to be said.
! What elegy can you give to a moment, what tribute to an era, a time and a you that were now bound in memory, to be recalled whenever you wished, but never to be relived? What justification can you give when everything changes, and you find yourself accustomed to that which was unknown before? The world moves on, demanding you move with it, but you do so anyhow, unthinkingly, unblinkingly plodding onwards as all is destroyed, and all is created?
! It was darker now. Hours had wandered past the bench, chasing off the pigeons, and replacing them with long shadows. There were things that needed to be done. Things that rudely interrupted the world that the pair had created for themselves.
! He picked up his briefcase from where it had been lying. She walked over to put her finished newspaper into the bin. Supper beckoned. He figured he’d buy it from the supermarket, when he got there.
! Reality. A monochrome blur whirring back into motion like a zoetrope. For a while, the past had danced again, joyfully pirouetting through memories of special moments and reflections on what was, and what had to be.
! This time, they walked together past the terraces. He had told her of his world. She had told him of her world. They still had things in common. A lot of new things in common. Lamplight, and flickering screens. The meaning of midnight. Connections.
! Then they parted, as a cargo plane roared overhead, the sound of its engines disrupting the calm, almost dreamlike, atmosphere.
! It started to rain.
! They never met again.