Said So (Cliche)

- The difference between me and you is that you’re the one everyone loves to love, I’m the one everyone loves to hate.

Drawing lines

As you walk looking down you remember how walking could heal you back then, when you were there. Maybe it was the perfect pavement, the golden maple leaves, the cold wet wind pushing your hair from your face.

Not here.

The irregular concrete, the ugliness, the dirt, the crooked streets can’t calm this heart, can’t soothe your thoughts, not even when it’s raining.

You sigh.

Suddenly a familiar smell takes you back to your first flat in this town. The cheap wardrobe had been recently painted white, and the humid wood determined how the whole bedroom would smell, forever, in your memories.

It’s not the same city.

Only today, you already heard Mandarin in a shop, Spanish on the bus, English at the café. The american girl next to you talks in a strong accent, holding a map in her hands, her hair up in a fashion that immediately reveals her as a foreigner. She doesn’t know. She had a cappuccino and a bottle of water and now leaves, absent minded, as you both cross eyes for a second.

Unsuccessfully, you grasp for a word or words that would correctly communicate a fusion of sentiments, thoughts and perceptions that had been hunting you the past few days and that have, now, found their climax.

What is it, pain? But what pain? Loneliness? Longing? Fear, anxiety, passion? No, none of these, nothing like this at all, in fact:  ’cause there’s love and hope and hunger and bad sleep.

But would it change if you could name it? You lift your eyes and look around you. Maybe someone there knows it. Maybe the guy with the moustache, reading the newspaper, or the old lady eating her sandwich. The couple standing in the queue, perhaps they know all these answers.
But you’re just as far from them as from truth.

And you remind yourself that, after the climax, things are bound to change. Then, how?

You draw lines in your notepad, pointlessly, while you sip cold coffee. Now the rain is gone, it’s time to leave.