I wrote this a few years ago. I wanted to write something sad. It's not the greatest, but I think I got the point across.
He hadn’t seen Lucy in years. If they had been anywhere else, he would never have even glanced at her. It was her voice that had lifted his head. The sound nearly brought a tear to his eye. Lucy, with whom he had once spent every honeyed day of their youth with. Lucy, the scent of whose hair would haunt him until the day he died. Lucy, no longer the girl he remembered, but the woman who stared at him out of the same sad, sky-blue eyes.
He resisted the urge to sweep her up and kiss her with all the passion that had come explosively alive within him. How long had it been since he had seen her last?
Too long. Far, far too long.
She began to speak again. He could hardly hear her over the rush of blood in his ears, and the general cacophony of the smoky old bar he had found himself in.
“I heard you guys were going to be playing here in town. How have you been?” Her smile was polite, cold. He remembered how she would shine like the sun when she would flash him her mischievous grin over any of the countless jokes they shared. He could see her life since they parted had been unkind.
“Yeah, I’m doing fine. After this tour we’re gonna go out to Greece for some R and R before we start in on the next album.”
He didn’t want to talk about his band, the Fallen, their platinum hit Scarlet Heart, their awards, the crowds of gloomy teens in Fallen tee-shirt, wearing scarred wrists, clamoring for their music, or the endless highway of stops and sleepless nights between here and there on their third tour. He didn’t want to think of the sting of whiskey in his throat or the cigarette burning to ash between his fingers. All he wanted was to remember perfect, cool, cloudless nights they spent laying in the grass, staring into the heavens with her small soft hand in his.
“I saw your interview on the Kelly Show. You look fantastic!”
Lucy. Such enthusiasm marked her speech for as long as he had known her. For her, things were never simply good or ok or alright. She never saw mundane things. For her, beauty had been everywhere. That song was amazing! Your voice is wonderful! You look fantastic! Nothing was mundane for her.
“You look pretty alright yourself.”
The lie burned him. She looked far from horrible. She had aged well, leaving behind the slim boyish figure she once wore for something that closely resembled the sleek lines of a sports car. Her hair was still the color of the brilliant sunset and her eyes were still the bluest-blue he had ever seen. Now, though, her movements weren’t quite as graceful as he recalled. Her eyes flicked about nervously, something he was sure she never used to do before. She seemed faded, shadowed, like a cloud hung over her perpetually. Where once was fire now just a few small, dying embers remained. And pain.
So much pain in her eyes. How she had suffered. What had happened in the years since he left for California? What troubles had she had to face to turn his beautiful Lucy, who had once made his heart sing its scarlet love, into this shade? How many lonely tears caught on her pillow on starless nights? How she had cried, the fine lines of her face told the story.
“I haven’t seen you in forever. What have you been working on?”
She would never tell the truth of it, he knew. Not Lucy. She would put on her brave, brave face and muddle through as she always did. Nothing would keep her from making sure you knew everything was fine, especially when she wasn’t. It was always the same old, same old.
“Me and the band have been keeping pretty busy. Writing, and the tour. You know. Same old, same old.”
He smiled in assurance. He wanted to take her with him, to make her talk to him He wanted her to stop being so damn tough for once. He wanted it to be like the day before he boarded a jet for L.A. when she had finally let down her defenses. She showed him her bruises. She always pretended it was because she was clumsy. He had known deep down that wasn’t the case. She had shown him the ropey scars on the back of her thighs, from when she had knocked over daddy’s beer when she was four, not from the neighbor’s vicious dog like she had been saying for years. If she hadn’t been so stubborn, so prideful, would she have begged him to take her with him? He blamed himself for whatever it was that had happened to her since then. If-onlys danced through his skull.
“That’s great!”
Another lie. Touring sucked.
“So, got yourself a boyfriend or something?”
He regretted his question immediately. Something like fondness, terror and guilt passed in and out of her eyes like dappled shadows.
God, she’s found someone just like her dad. I bet a nickel.
But that’s what happened to girls like her. Eventually knights in shining armor ride off to do more important things in shining cities made of concrete and glass, and the damsels they leave behind wait for the knights to return like they promised and whisk them off to those gleaming metropolises. She had gotten tired of waiting. She had written him off. He wished he hadn’t. He thought she’d have the moxy to leave the first time things went bad. But he knew better. It wasn't until after the third or fourth time she had climbed through his window and cried herself to sleep in his arms without a single word all those years ago. He could’ve saved her. If only she had said something. Could he now?
Let me steal you away to a place where nothing will hurt you ever again.
But her life was here. He couldn’t ask her to leave it all behind on a whim.
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