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The car was an old Ford. A Mustang 67. Yellow, obviously, the most screaming color choice of all for a man who never wanted to fit in. Nevertheless, he did, in the end, fit in. Seamlessly, in all her creaks and corners, like the last piece to her thousand piece puzzle, difficulty grand. Until he no longer did. Until she once again felt broken, as she had in the earlier years of their on and off relationship. Torn between a grown love, which was what it felt like at the time, and that young love, her childhood crush once again reigniting itself with all the changes happening around her. Someone was picking away the pieces, one by one, throwing them away to corners even she could not see, and he could not find. So she made the wrong choice. She kissed the wrong guy. She kept it from the right guy, for reasons still unknown, even to her, even to him. And if he could not decipher her, who could? In the end, the wrong guy turned out to be the wrong guy, as they often do, and the right guy drove away in his yellow mustang, taking another part of the puzzle with him. Perhaps, even, the biggest part of them all.
A part of her, selfishly, always thought she would be the one to leave. She would go to college, as she had applied to them all. He would to, possibly, even if it had looked a little dicey there for a minute, being declared dead and all. She would be the one to get away, from her overbearing mother, dead father, brainwashed sister. From this whole town, shadier than the shady man. She never realized how badly he wanted the same thing. There was no overbearing mother, no dead father, no brainwashed sister. They were all gone, to a place he would not follow. Maybe that was what suffocated her in the end. Hearing him say she was his only future. With her decisions, their future went away, as she always, in the darkest parts of her heart, knew would be the inevitable end. She wondered if he knew it too, and if that was why, instead of her hugging him goodbye in a green sundress on her mother’s porch, he drove away from the wrong guy’s house in an old yellow Mustang - “’cause you can’t drive to Toronto on a motorcycle”. You could, but she told him she did not want him to. So he didn’t. She also did not want him to leave. She never said. So he did.
She never studied journalism, for reasons unknown, though he, he would have known, had he still been around to know her. Perhaps she didn’t want to become her mother. She ultimately followed in her brothers footsteps, deranged as he was, applying to the academy to become someone who enforced rules she herself had never followed, never would follow, even with a badge in her pocket that told everyone she would. She was not good at it. The rule following, nor the job in general. It turned out she made rash decisions, yelled easily, drew her gun at the wrong times at the wrong people. She had a talent for that, picking the wrong people. She didn’t cry when they put her on desk duty. She talked to her therapist about all the mysteries she had solved. The murder of a teenage boy, her own father’s killings, the attempted death of her ex-boyfriend. She did not tell her of the means she had used to solve them. She wanted to work in the field, after all, and telling her therapist about all her accomplishments and how fine she was, was the way to be reinstated. But she never was, so eventually, she did what she always did.
Being back home was everything she thought it would be. Excruciating, mostly. Her mother was still her overbearing self, yet seven years had brought lines to her face so deep they could only come from plain, old misery. Her sister’s green irises, so similar to her own, were covered in sooty black makeup, blending perfectly with the equally dark bags under her eyes. The two second graders gave her déjà vu, looking so much like another young pair of twins she once knew. They had fallen apart in her absence, just as the town itself. There were not much pep left, if any. She could not blame them. She had lost it herself. The girl in the pictures, aligning her perfectly white wardrobe in her perfectly pink room, showed a version of herself so long forgotten it did not feel like her at all. Standing there, feeling like an intruder in her own life, she looked through the window, as she often had, with her other best friend, with her sister. There, staring right back at her with his brightest smile, was the wrong guy. She wondered if the boy next door knew he was the wrong guy when she kissed him, or he kissed her, and she drove away her right guy, and he his right girl. The excited wave and call me sign was answer enough.
“I really missed you,” he said, with all the sincerity you could possibly pack into one sentence. She had not missed him at all, a blow to the gut she had realized fairly quickly into her first year of kicking ass and taking names. She told him she missed him too. She was always a decent liar, the only one who could see through her somewhere far away. “Have you talked to her?” she asked, because she had not. Not once had she picked up the phone to call her former best friend, the V to her B, nor had she. “Oh yeah, all the time. She comes by every few months to check on her parents. She’s married now, with a kid on the way”. He smiled so joyfully, as if his ex being happy was the only thing he could ever ask for, and she finally understood that her best female friend had never been his right girl, and he was not her right guy. Only in the moment. She wondered if her moment would pass too. She grabbed his hand at some point. He squeezed it, then released it, then told her about this petite blonde he was currently dating. She sounded like everything she wasn’t. “Have you talked to him?” he asked, quieter now. She knew he knew she hadn’t, which meant he talked to him, so she didn’t answer nor ask. “Did you read the book?”
She first bought the book the day it was released. She paced back and forth in her tiny Quantico apartment, staring at the red checkout marker until she finally forced herself to click it. She continued to pace for days until it arrived in the mail. She looked at it, read the title, then the author’s name, and promptly threw it in the trash. She bought it again, two months later, in a Barnes & Noble. This time she read the back of the slight black book that felt like a brick between her fingers, while standing right outside, tripping in the cold December air. There was no picture. She didn’t make it to the end of the description before giving it to a homeless woman with a distant smile at her surprised thanks. The third time she bought it, she kept it. Not for the book itself, because she, at the age of 25 after owning it for years, had still not opened it past the first page, yet that first page had been looked at so many times there were stains covering its wrinkled ears. To the right girl, hoping you someday find your right guy. “I have a copy, if you want it”. His place looked exactly the same, remnants of his father still visible in every decoration, or lack thereof. She thanked him, for the book, not for the pity in his eyes that told her that he knew more then he let on. He had reached out, apologized profusely, and he, so easy to forgive, had forgiven his best friend for all his faults. They talked every week over skype. That was all he was willing to say. She wondered if that was his own choice or something that was asked of him. She skipped the first page. Then she read it all.
There was a beat up old truck in the driveway. It wasn’t yellow. A new bike stood behind it, next to an older, more loved one. The house was small, secluded and everything he had ever talked about, the few times she allowed him to talk about their future. It still amazed her how he only pictured futures where they were together, a childlike optimism so estranged from his usual state ranging from indifference to raging negativity. There was a time where she accused him of pushing her away. Where he had told her he would continue to do so. Until it sticks. In the end, he had held on for dear life, and she had been the one to do the sticking. She could hear voices inside. Two, maybe three. One distinctly female. One his, maybe, though it sounded darker, void of the nagging sharpness that used to annoy her during the time she was in love with her childhood best friend and found the constantly frustrated beanie-wearing boy to be quite the buzzkill. She considered who she could be. The woman. A friend, probably. A lover, not unlikely. She wanted to leave, avoid all potential scenarios of misery, but she had once accused him of taking the easy way out when the syrup got sticky, and she had always sought to be better than him. She knocked. The woman opened.
“How long has she been staying with you?” she asked, and looked over to the worn brown couch where his sister was snoring softly. He shrugged, looked at his watch, then at her. “Four months,” he said, though it sounded little like a statement. “She comes and goes, even brings boys back home. Makes me a lot more sympathetic towards your mother and her incapability of pronouncing my name”. He smiled, endearingly, not bitterly, as he would have, talking about her less than welcoming family back in their teens. “It’s nice. It gets lonely here, sometimes, though my younger self would hate to admit it. I’m less of a lone wolf than I thought”. He no longer drank his coffee pitch black, but a delicate chocolate brown. It could be a metaphor for something, if she’d still known have to write about him as anything other than the tragedy she had thought he would be. This man before him was nothing like the reflection of his father she had expected to see. If he drank more than the occasional beer, his looks didn’t show it. His hair was shorter, edgy, framing softer cheeks, the telltale sign of a man who loved food and finally could afford said food. His eyes were bright, alight with years of success, of being seen and appreciated. He looked good, so she told him as much. “Yeah?” he said, asking for confirmation he didn’t need. “I feel good”.
If there ever was a contest, he had won. She told him so. Not in so many words, but they both got the gist of it. She didn’t say nearly all the things she wanted to say. She told him she had missed him. That she was sorry. That she should have done better. She hushed him when he opened his mouth to disagree. She told him about her inability to see something through, something she had been working on with her therapist after reading his book. She ignored the slight guilt in his eyes that told her he knew she had read between the lines, how the perfect girl next door had been flawed, how it had been their ultimate downfall, and how his own tendency to take the easy way out was what eventually made him take the hardest one. The leaving one. The character in the book, him, had not. He had stayed, they had both suffered through months of silence, of never saying what needed to be said, and it had all ended anyway. At least this way, his way, one of them ended up happy. She asked him what happened to the Mustang. Broken down halfway to Toronto, apparently, though not surprisingly after finding out he had recovered it from Junkyard Steve. “Probably for the best,” he said with a bashful smile. “It was a good metaphor for saying goodbye to my angsty teenage self”. A good truck had always suited him better, anyway.
She left without telling him she’d always love him, though she supposed he knew. He let her go without telling her to stay, which she wouldn’t do. She returned the jacket she had kept after he left, saying see you again, and not goodbye, because they would, see each other again. If not for years, then someday. It felt like enough.
Sometimes closure comes in knowing you helped each other grow, and that a love’s worth isn’t any less, just because it’s time to let it go.