“Come with me.”
“What?”
“Come. With me.”
At a genuine loss for words, I say nothing. He takes my silence as a signal to continue. “Come with me to New York. Or even if a city like that is too much for you, we can start somewhere smaller. I’m not going back to work for a while. We can go anywhere you want. Just come with me and get yourself out of this place! I feel good about this.”
My head begins to shake back and forth voicing my immediate thoughts before I can even do so and as I begin to open my mouth he cuts me off.
“Just think about it. Consider the things we could do. What you could see.”
The bewilderment on my face transforms to confusion as I see he’s serious. He really wants me to come with him. For once in my entire career, I’m unsure how to help. The solutions here are not ones I find myself able to perform. And yet, in spite of knowing this truth, as I look at the man in front of me, I can’t help but honor his request and consider what life could be like if I, for once, decided something for me.
Could I be friends with him? Could I love this man? Could he love me? Could I be happy elsewhere? Am I even happy right now?
Maybe we’d travel to New York like he’d originally mentioned, but I wouldn’t get overwhelmed. I would like it and maybe we’d stay there for a while. Maybe I’d cook breakfast for him in the mornings and our days would be filled with lazy afternoons and nighttimes full of exploration and dinner dates and passionate love making.
Maybe when he finally went back to work I’d sit at home and await his return. Or maybe I’d go out and get a job of my own, similar to what I do now or even something different. Maybe on my lunch break I’d go to pretentious little book shops and music stores. I might purchase art and come home and ponder how these people just understood the human experience as well as they did. Ask, did they make this up? Or were their thoughts just so easily dictated that they could put them to paper without struggle. Maybe I’d scour through literature and fiction all day from my fire escape in the city, trying to find every single emotion I’d ever felt memorialized into a piece of art. Maybe I’d find each and every one, and realize that I’ve never had a unique experience. I might discover that no inner turmoil I’ve had is so unparalleled that no human before hasn’t experienced it twelve times over, and had a more competent description of it than I. Maybe I’d find an author who was from here, or who had at least been, once. Maybe I’d ask if any of these wordsmiths had familiarity with the darkness I feel inside myself. And if they had answers as to how to chase it away, or why it keeps on coming back.
Maybe I’d really like New York, and being in love, and being something other than whatever it is I am right now. Or maybe I wouldn’t, and I’d like nothing more than to return to the comfort of the only place I’d ever known. No matter how uncomfortable this place, this blip, had been to me in actuality.
“No,” I feel myself say out loud, through a shaky breath that betrays my hard exterior. “I can’t. I’m sorry.” The man’s face drops. I feel my heart do the same.
“You sure?” He asks. “Let me save you from this place.”
“I don’t very much need saving,” I tell him with a soft smile. I can’t exactly be sure if I’m being honest or not.
“Well alright,” the man concedes. “Maybe we’ll cross paths again in the future?” He turns to pull up the handle on his suitcase before looking back at me with expectant eyes.
We will not, I think. That much I know is truth. I give a slight nod anyways, for the sake of keeping hope alive. In him, that is. And then I watch the man walk down the corridor, taking the same trek that everyone who was once lost and now found in the land I call home take, back to theirs.
I look onwards at his shoulders leveling themselves back and forth in his wrinkled suit jacket and wait for something, anything to hit me. A pang of regret, a twinge of guilt, a momentary wake to mourn the life I never could have had. But it does not come. I watch the man get smaller and smaller until he ceases to exist, so quickly so, that I briefly question whether or not he was ever here at all.
Maybe he expected me to feel sad and put my own personal spin on an airport cinema scene. One with lots of running and tears, and a flight that just so happens to have one minute left until the gates close. Maybe I also expected that of myself.
But I do no such thing.
Ultimately, I know I made the right choice. Really, the only option for a woman like me.
Here is comfortable. Here is safe. And honestly, I can’t help but wonder who would help all the lost ones if I no longer made myself available to do so.
