Unrequited

" Tread softly because you tread on my dreams "

Under cover of midday he vaulted the whitewashed wall, unslotted the top and bottom bolts with a grating metal drawl and unhooked the latch to let her enter this back-garden paradise. The door jamb stuck, swollen from unseasonable rain, wild flowers and weeds had flourished from the same inclement weather states. Hundreds of tiny blue blooms, detached from their spindly stalks, she cast upon the goldfish pond’s gloomy surface tension torque.

Removing their shoes and socks, they stood in the water together, calf-deep, holding each other as they kissed, and took an oath to keep. Never part, grow old or forget this day the start of some magical future. Nothing could get in the way. There was no greater love, no one before and no one after. The sublimeness of the situation glowed as the sun made their unprotected skins redden and their young soft lips blister.

It lasted just a matter of days before they went their separate ways, over some unmendable yet trivial difference or mistake, never to be seen again until exactly 41 years had flashed past. (He checked his diaries and there it was, spread over three pages - their undying love) She reached out on Facebook, he stalked up her profile, she had become quite the adult, grown into her beauty and yet there she was, just under maturity’s thin layer, still twenty.

The message was long, atrocious, news of being diagnosed with an illness, prognosis unfavourable. Just a few weeks left to tidy up, and sign out. During a bout of heaving up, what little was left in her stomach, noticing the forget-me-not pattern on the kitchen towel she dabbed her mouth clean with. It had come to her as an epiphany. The dull pain present and with her all her life was not this illness growing but the ache of them, lost to each other.

The frustration of the unrequited, segued to a love never blighted - a relief from the death and the misery that was surrounding everyone and everything she knew. Obsessed, in love with the thought of the love they could have had, a love never tried, tested, or expressed past an ideal both, separately, pictured and yearned for. They had found each other just in time, to truly know love, accept and understand but never to have to meet, disappoint or sully it.

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Shoreditch, London 2023. Nikon d750

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