Observation WA

I don’t like having habits, he said.

I did not point out that I, myself, was becoming a habit to him in a way. Reoccurring, popping up out of the mind fog through the years just to dive right back in a short time later. A few days is all it takes to stick, to remind you of our summer, our first days, our origin. Remembering images floating by on the AppleTV screen as we made out, and watched season 5. I ate avocados and watched you laugh as we got stoned. You, blazed. I was almost always late and lived in a sketchy building, but those were not important details to you. It is not constant, we were never constant. Our locations shift, and they are almost never the same. Our goals, and our dreams differ and shift without the knowledge of the other. This fact feels like something we both know, and do not want to acknowledge–especially now. It may never be acknowledged that we are temporary. We leave it to linger in the space between us because neither of us knows how to address it, or why it must be true. We just know it is true and will probably always be so. This is not necessarily a negative take, just one that leaves us feeling breathless for the wrong reasons on occasion.

Yeah, I said, I feel you.

I looked out the window toward the mountains and the ocean, toward the city full of people. Toward a town I knew nothing about and was visiting for a short time. The most I saw of the town was him. I wondered what he was thinking about as he drove along, the sun setting and drawing drama on the contours of his face. I like to imagine we thought about the same things: how this was going, was this becoming a habit? I thought of his question the night before: What happens when you leave? And wondered where this would go, knowing it was likely just as nowhere as we have ever been. A text here. An ignored text there. Next week we will be fresh, alive and involved with someone else, every once in a while dreaming of the other. Once and a while sending a text or a snap or a motion into the void, hoping the other may feel it, or even more respond.

Are you happy?

I did not know how to answer. I awaited the arrival of my meal as a distraction, I sipped my beer as I realized happiness was not a forethought but rather an assumption. You had dragged me to this place where I had to look at you and say, I don’t know. Because at some point, it was a question and then later a No.

Neither of us dared burst this bubble that we lived in currently–this temporary happiness in each other. Floating down the same highway, on the same frequency, in the same vehicle. Headed, for once, to the exact same place.

We danced and sang as you drove, mountains and ocean and city to our right, on our way into a future of pretenses, just for a few more days. We smiled as if we had forgotten the temporariness of it all, and had fallen into a sense of permanence–of something bigger, stronger, happier. Something fictitious. Not for others, not even for us as individuals, but for us as a twosome. For us as a pair, as a couple, as people who sat across the table from each other at dinner for 5 nights in a row asking questions that aren’t for restaurant settings.

But that is what draws me to you.