Love Eternal

By Rosamund Davies

You’ve been sitting at this cafe table for an hour now. You’ve checked your emails, your social media; you’ve updated your apps and read the news. There’s nothing else your mobile has to offer. You look around. People are talking, laughing. That couple looks happy, leaning close to each other. The man sipping slowly in the corner though, he could be waiting, just like you.

You give up scrutinizing your fellow patrons and sip your own drink, then sink into idleness, staring blankly at the door, waiting. You’re used to waiting; you’ve waited many times before, and in a minute he’ll appear, smoothing back his hair, flustered, apologetic, beautiful. He knows you’ll forgive him. He knows that when you see him it’s this moment now that matters, not what went before. When you see him, your heart will lift and expand, and the long minutes of waiting will melt away into the longing to be together, now, in the future, forever.

The door opens; he enters. He sees you and waves, his face a mixture of contrition and expectation. He’s pushed it pretty far this evening—there’s late and then there’s late. You wait for the constriction on your heart to ease. Then you realize there is no constriction. Your heart beats dully in your chest, even and unhurried, while your lover hurries to your table.

He approaches, and you realize that there’s something worse than waiting for an hour for your lover to show; worse than wondering if he loves you, if he has any respect for you, if you mean anything to him; worse even than your lover never turning up at all. Worse than all those things, you understand in this moment, as he bends over to kiss you, ready to be forgiven, that his presence no longer has the power to heal.

You wish that he had not come because now that he is here, sitting across from you, taking your hand, leaning in close to you, you are seized only by the numb, gray realization that you no longer care. Your heart sinks, and you wish that you could go back to those moments before he arrived, back to staring at the door like the man in the corner, back to sipping your drink and waiting. You wish you could just keep waiting, waiting for love eternal.