Remembered Day

I still remember the way your smile showed both your top and bottom teeth. How you'd squint as you laughed, little lines forming around your eyes. How the silver grey in your eyes glinted a little, even though there was so little light. As if they shone on their own, from deep inside. 

I've never expected to meet someone at a bar that I'd form any kind of connection with. Never a friend, definitely not a woman. I always kind of thought of bars as just facilities to go to with friends. A place where people anonymously mingle, and part ways at the end of the night, back to their own lives apart from each other. 

The bar was a dingy one. I remember the little light they had seemed to be swallowed up by the black floors and tables and walls, everything to hide the wide variety of stains built up over the years. My shoes stuck to the ground with each step, each threatening to suck my shoe right off my foot. The clientele seemed equally slightly dingy: skin a little too sunburned, arms a little too tattooed, hair a little too greasy. 

I don't think others would label me introverted, but it's how I see myself. I don't normally approach strangers, definitely not women as attractive as you were. My friend being highly interested in yours helped I guess. 

I remember being just slightly buzzed, enough that I was relaxed. Slow enough that I felt the attraction before any kind of gripping anxiety or fear could take hold. Just enough that I could be just me, and talk to just you. We spoke like friends of twenty years. You laughed at my shitty jokes and touched my arm. I held your hand as we spoke about our fears. The music pounded away, I could feel the stickiness of a thousand spilled drinks on the couch gluing itself to my pants, but still we spoke, right into each others ears to be heard. 

And as we stood outside, you asked me something. Something that suddenly brought reality crashing down on top of me. I felt like I had been hit by a train. You asked if I wanted to walk you home. For some reason up until that point, this had been a chance encounter, a moment of fleeting serendipity. Something that would end as the final song played, and we would go back to our own lives. But you had felt it. Like I had felt it. This was something a little more than that. You put your hand in mine, not waiting for a response, and turned to take me with you, turning to a street that seemed to stretch endlessly ahead of me. Stretch into a future that seemed a little brighter than the night itself. 

It was the middle of summer, but it felt like the dead of winter. That odd quiet after a fresh snowfall, as if the whole city is under the blankets and asleep, or speaking in whispers. Nothing could touch me. Or you. 

And with a single screech that all shattered. As your friend swooped in, and saved you from me. You had to go home together, you both had an early morning the next day, she didn't have space in her car for another person. The reasons rattled on and on, but it was already over. You were gone. 

I'd be lying if I said not a day goes by that I don't think about you. I don't think about you. Years have gone by since that night. I've gone months without thinking about you at a time. 

I don't know what I hope to accomplish by writing all this. Maybe some closure? Maybe. I doubt you'll ever find this. So much time and space has passed since then, us meeting in a city I don't live in. Not knowing if you've moved away. So much could have happened since then. So much HAS happened since then. 

That night was like any other, and yet...
yet still...
I am waiting for another like that to come again. 
Waiting for your intoxicating laughter
Waiting for your smile, with the tops and bottom teeth all showing.