We played one of my favorite games: cat and mouse with our affections through narrow Boston streets.
It didn’t start out like that, no, it started out with him buffeting like a sail in high winds. He was “five hundred pounds lighter”, he said. He was happier than he’d been in months. He felt like himself again. He recoiled at the idea of who he was when we were dating. We were toxic. He’s so glad it’s over.
I nodded along. From where I stood, it was obvious that he was engaged in a valiant effort of rewriting history. But who was I to stop him?
He’d thought it would be a quick half hour meet up, in-and-out, he said later. It wasn’t.
We talked our way to a raggedy field, where we sat in the sparse grass and he condemned our past relationship, bid it good riddance, flipped it off. After half an hour of this I asked if we could find a place for me to pee, which led us to stand and to walk more, two hours more, to be precise.
Even in antagonistic conversation we supported each other, almost as a compulsion- “mhmms” and “yeahs” and “sorry, what’s” after accidental interruptions. A few times I looked over at him and it felt positively surreal to be walking a mere foot away from him. How he was close, but untouchable. (?) (But if I wished it?)
When our eyes met and held for longer than two seconds it was as though a mechanism locked into place and something else poured forth. Liquid dopamine. Love? When we exchanged combative words back and forth, swerving slightly around trash cans and tree trunks, I felt the ebb and flow of our words and our feet. Cats, both of us: mice, the other person’s heart of hearts.
“Part of me wishes I didn’t push so hard for us to date,” he says. “We could’ve stayed great friends.”
I look straight ahead at the skinny road stretching out in front of us. I’m about to say I don’t regret anything.
“But you had to be so dang cute.”
I turned to him, my smile reaching my eyes, my eyes meeting his. We look away quickly, in opposite directions: the result of two months’ worth of emotional distance.
“Arghhhhh.”
He lets out a short, hard breath.
“It’s all coming back to me. Why I fell for you. How we can be so great.”
In my mind I rush to him and embrace him, coo him some lullaby of my love. In the world I say,
“I know, I feel the same way. It’s so strange to be here with you now….like this…it’s kinda sad.”
I laugh a little, sadly.
We look at each other in the penitent summer dusk. It is a dream. We look away. I smile. Cat-mouse.
We near the three hour mark and we hug on a corner and part ways. The moment takes its last breath not a moment premature.
Neither of us drew a sword to the moment. Neither of us raised the heavy metal, brought it down upon our shared present. We assailed each other with verbal barbs and eye-daggers but we stayed, and stayed, and this, the staying, was the night’s emotional truth.
He texts me the next day: the butterflies in his stomach kept him up at night. I admit the same. The darkness of my ceiling was replaced by my mental replication of his eyes, his beautiful blue eyes. Had he kissed me, I confessed, I would have reciprocated.
But he would not have been a cat then, and neither would I: we would only be two little mice, with little mice tails and mice whiskers and mice teeth, very different from what we imagined ourselves to be, and wretched.
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Abigail Livingston is an emerging writer and experienced actor. She currently divides her time between Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
