when your mind lies to you (1)
I was taking an afternoon walk with you. The sun sets failingly as the cloudy grays try to conceal the shine. It had just rained. What a perfect afternoon but we are dragging our feet over the wet pavements as they shimmer, just like the sea. I like how the sunny stray lights make the leaves a little bit golden. Our glowing faces make it seems like there’s not much happening in our heads. I feel warm and so is your hand. Every moment with you feels like this. If only the warmness could last when we’re back in our own cold cribs. Regardless, I am at this moment, and I wouldn’t let this stillness be moved.
I was fixing my point & shoot strapped around my neck and that’s when I saw them. The madame and the man, both wearing their comfiest clothes, with their masks on. It’s the usual. A couple of persons, maybe spouses, having an afternoon talk. I can sense the warmth of their relationship, it’s familiar. They’re friends, that’s for sure. Their very presence intrigues me. So I point the camera in their direction and just before it shutters, the madame witnesses my lens staring back at her. The man doesn’t seem to notice me, but the madame doesn’t look so pleased by a random person invading her afternoon. So I try to be subtle. I look the other way in haste and pretend to take another shot. You and I sat down by the seawall. You gaze upon the ends of the sea, “ What a perfect afternoon,” you said.
I try to forget we are just a few feet away from them, pretending I’m unaware of the discomfort I just created. I glanced back at them but they are not them anymore, the madame and the man. And suddenly, a wave of thoughts and questions comes flooding in:
What if the future me hurts the future you? What if I hurt you 20 years from now? And you’d look back and see me not as the person you’ve loved before. Maybe that’s why the madame looks at me with a grit of disappointment because she sees me — a memory of her past, a different person she had loved, you have loved — that will hurt her in the future.
I couldn’t see the man’s face because maybe he was me. Maybe I couldn’t bear to look back and grieve for a lost version of myself that I can never ever bring back.
Maybe the warmth I felt was a feeling resonating from the past. And the madame and the man, are just here by the sea, to live by the lives they chose as they look back wishing their past selves chose differently.
(arts ; 2021)
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