The End

The End

He had been the first to suggest the idea of meeting online, and yet, as they sat, closely facing each other and on either side of the ocean, when she suggested that he begin the conversation, he bluntly stated that the meeting had been her idea. She should have known. She should have stayed silent. She should have admitted to herself that she had been wrong, and said goodbye. She should have slid her finger across the touchpad, towards the red rectangle on the screen, and gently pressed, thus returning to the quiet solitude of her couch, and her continent.

But she pressed on... "Well", said she, "I thought"...And every word, every expression, every effort to show herself, to please him, seemed to horrify him. Foreseeing his reactions, she kept her eyes on her own smiling and sad image, in a desperate attempt to endear at least herself. “Why? “asked he, had she chosen to live in that country, full of envy and unhappiness? Well... she was working, she was working so hard, she was surviving. “More work”, he grimaced “does not mean more money”, and she felt that even for this he had chosen to despise her, and she wished desperately to say that she worked not to make money, but to live, to breathe, to help her family, to try again, and again...

She remembered, but didn’t mention, how her old father had once found twenty thousand dollars thrown onto the river’s margin in Brazil. They lived in an old and quiet village off the Rio Negro, right before it merged into the mighty Amazon, and from the hills behind their home they could see the black and yellow waters meet and slowly merge. No one knew how it had showed up there... twenty thousand dollars, more than her father could make in a lifetime and fishing. He didn’t know what the green paper was, but must have guessed it had some value. He carefully blew the dirt off the large mound of bills, folded them into his cloth and tied them to the back of his donkey. And when she saw that, she knew... On Sundays, when they travelled to the nearby town to go to church, she would sit with the rest of the villagers in one of the few homes with a television. She knew they were dollars; she knew they were rich... Would there be any sense in staying there? Here she could work, she could fight, she was proud, she could help her family and her village.

All of this she wanted to say, to explain, but she was overwhelmed by his beauty, by a gutting, fearful feeling in her throat, by the distrust in his eyes, and by a longing to be near him, which she feared, she foresaw, she would never fulfil. And so, she smiled, she looked away, and words dropped shyly from the mouth; the words formed a dark and deep pit, ready to swallow her entirely.

She looked at him and tried to explain her presentiment, but he scoffed. “How” he seemed to say “can you claim so blithely to know of things of which I know not myself?” (Was this his pride or her folly?). “How can you smile at a matter so serious?” How can you attempt to deceive me, when I see you inside and out”?

But there was no deceit intended. Tentatively, falteringly, she sought the words, links forming a chain that climbed around her neck and...

The end was coming, the moment when a hand, a mouse (or touchpad), a cursor, a red rectangle, would tear them from each other. He, he said, had to make lunch, and she, he continued, had woken up so early... it really wasn’t necessary, and, well, he had many important things to do...

She shut her notebook and opened another. A small, black, un-technological thing made of paper. It was blank and on the first page she drew a man, a woman, a family, in a village covered in trees, by the mighty Rio Negro.