The Tragedy of Hope

One look of you in passing inspires a thousand words. It has always been that way, and I always get weak in the knees when I see you and am struck with such a tragic hope. 

I regret that we never danced. Not once I realize now, too late to change it. I suppose we would have danced when we married, but the day never came. Or as I like to say, it was dramatically postponed. Maybe we were waiting for then to make it all the more special like people used to wait to make a baby. I suppose I might have grabbed you playfully once or twice and swept you across the kitchen floor, little different than I might a broom. I can still feel your hands sometimes, which were nothing like a wood handle.

Someday, I will dance with you here. And if it is not until we are 94, then it will well be worth the wait and I lived long for a purpose. And you'll swear I was the second coming of Fred Astaire, though I have two left feet that age, or the want of grace, shall never remedy. Then we will laugh and the world and our troubles will hardly matter anymore. There will be no family left living to be scornful of our reunion. No friends whose opinions you care about. All that will matter is what is and what has always been between us, even in absence or dormancy. You were always my Daisy. And I, your Gatsby. 

Have you sung that song? Young and Beautiful? Even in bed when you sleep and look to the ceiling? Do tears ever roll down your cheeks to the caves of your ears as they have many nights down mine? Time sometimes matters and it sometimes forgets. It often heals, they say. But it sometimes shipwrecks into tragedy that no one could ever have foreseen and ends romances abruptly. 

Patience and love I have in abundance and there is no fate to go against us as the fate that stunted Daisy and Jay with Scott's pen. No writer would ever end us that way. Our writer, I consider, is currently suffering from writer's block, or a temporary bout with alcoholism. But he will get better and rebound magnificently. 

I will see you again. Fate has given me you and it will not betray me and take you away. Signs still come, as one came this morning when I saw you in passing, though pretending I did not. There is no Tom that can stop you, no Myrtle dead on the broken windshield glass of the Roadster, no jealous husband wielding a revolver; though I lie face down in a pool of my own dissatisfaction, shot in the back it was by my own undoing. My heart still beating, I lay there in wait with endless breath in my aqualungs. I can't die without at least this first and last dance.

There is no love story as great, no tragedy so deep, and it will climax here. Someday. Whether we own, or we rent it, or we trespass. And if it is five years or fifty, despite whatever poverty I had to endure that might have compelled another man to pawn it, however many meals I must miss, however many nights I must spend on the cold street until some measure of wealth can be reattained, I will keep the ring in my pocket to give to you. And perhaps then, when you're in my arms, I will tell you a story so beautiful and tragic you will cry and I will fall to ash having spent my entire life burning up my soul for this one moment with you. It must be because it is and it always has been, so it is fated. I hope.