Lunch with the enemy. The man with no soul. The ex... the Tyrant of the Distance.

Frustrates me and delights me in turn... frustrating because there's so much we should be talking about it, and he wants to pretend everything is alright, nothing happened, he never hurt me like he did. We'll just skip that six monts or so, shall we?

Delightful because we can still talk, we still make each other laugh, we're still... okay.

I hover above us eating our sandwiches in Hyde Park, the young girl looking artsy with the layered clothing and meticulously messy hair, feet up on the seat... she has tried so hard to look like she hasn't tried too hard, but she smells nice, she looks better than usual, for him.

He looks more than the mere five years older than her, glasses and balding early, suit and tie and all corporate-like, upright and proper.

Would a passer-by peg me as his former lover... or as his kid sister?

Sometimes I look at him, at myself in conversation with him, and wonder how it was that we ever did have something... what was it that made him kiss me as I was walking away? What was it in me that kissed him back? Would I associate with someone like him normally, so far from my circle, if not for that night and some band called the Whitlams?

Probably not...

So what is it about him... that wants me to linger here?

Despite who he is, and what he does... he is still the man who rolled over one morning, with the flat of his hand on the small of my back, tracing swirly sea patterns there... and I lay there with my head on his chest, took his watch off his wrist so that time no longer held him, he could stay forever.

When I left the first time, we hugged for about five minutes, which I finally broke before I broke, or I never would have left. We kissed through my car window, his glasses clinking on my sunglasses.

Despite what has happened more recently, what happened before still exists.

I know we wouldn't have worked in the long term... but sometimes I pine for those moments again.

It was after the frustrating, delightful conversation and I was reassured of our differences, when he kissed me goodbye and I could smell the same aftershave, when he hugged me and my body remembered how comfortably we seemed to fit and his hand briefly moved on my back again...

I walked away smiling.

He will never say it... but his body tells me that he sometimes thinks it too.

I might hate him now, if not for those brief glimpses.

Before After

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