Thursday, 20 February 2014

a ninetieth story...'the long way around'

He said to come, and so I did – it was a simple decision.  My heart was already set, my mind too.  If he asked, I would go.  And he asked, so I went.  I felt about as calm as I had in a long while, things weren’t necessarily any better than they had ever been, and on some level I still distrusted his motives, or at least didn’t understand them; still, just to spend a weekend with him would be enough to live off for a while, and the anticipation helped me relax in the two or three days in between his invitation and my visiting.

So, I came out of the station and there he was, across the central reservation, wrapped up in a big blue scarf against the brisk winter south-westerly.  I had an urge to run across the lanes of Saturday morning traffic then and there.  But mother always told me, and I’ve since learned, in a metaphorical sense if you play in the road, you get run down.  It isn’t like in the movies where vehicles grind to halt, and ex-lovers race across car bonnets to meet each other in a freeze-frame embrace.  In real life you’d both end up as raspberry jam, another RTA statistic.

After a short pause, I brushed the hair from my eyes, and resolved to go the long way around. 

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