H
ere’s how I
always pictured
it: I’m downtown,
meeting someone for lunch or something at the Art Institute, and since I arrived early, I duck into a coffee shop for a little treat. As I reach for the door, it opens, and there you are. You’re holding a cup with a tea bag hanging out the top, and I remember, not for the first time, my disbelief that you never liked coffee. But all the same, there you are.
You look as surprised as I feel, and I surprise myself by smiling, saying hello. We shift awkwardly, still in the doorway. Oh, you say, Wow, it’s you. Your expression is hard to read. But I try anyway.
It’s me, I say. I need coffee, I admit. Do you have a minute? Want to join me?
You pull out your phone – still no watch, unhurriedly scrolling to a calendar, I assume – sure. You say, I guess I’ve got a sec.
We find a table in the corner, and I pop up to the counter to pick up my order and rejoin you, choosing the seat across from him, not beside. I gesture toward his cup.
“Still a tea drinker?” I ask the obvious question, hoping to come across as nice.
“Still an addict?” he teases a little sharply. How does that tone still get to me?
“Guilty.” I shrug, sipping my latte. We are quiet for a moment, and I begin wondering if I should have just acted like I didn’t see him and kept going by. But I feel him looking at me and turn my eyes to take in his face. It’s the same as I remember, older, a little tired.
We both are. He has less hair, and mine has more gray. But we are the same. And also now basically strangers.
He asks about my work, I ask about his. We trade phones and look at each other’s kids — about the same age. We observe how tall they are, bemoan the cost of food, pants, braces, college. Things old people talk about.
We are those old people now.
He asks about my family, I say I’m sorry to hear about his mother’s passing.
“She never completely forgave me when you left,” he admits. “She blamed me completely.”
shrug again. “We were too young. Mistakes were made,” I admit, trying to deflect, not blame. Both things are true, we know.
He tells me a story about a mutual friend he recently ran into on a golf course, and as he tells it, his voice takes me back to when we were first together. How he’d make me laugh. How he had big ideas and dreams. Road trips. Other trips. Bad apartments and nicer apartments and then our apartment. His laugh and smile. When his hair was longer than mine, and oh, how his mother hated that long hair, but I sort of missed it when he finally cut it off. Nice holidays and sad holidays and then holidays apart. And then lives apart and moving on. Both of us have children with other people, unaware of each other’s day-to-day lives.
Until today.