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The sight of him doing his own grocery shopping is something I never thought I’d witness. Something so everyday and public; something I’d never been privy to in our past lives. I jerk back into the aisle when he starts to look up, turning so I’m facing away as he walks past. I count to five and grab a box of cereal to hide behind before I peek back just as he steps in line to pay.
He isn’t very far. I could take a dozen steps and be right behind him.
Part of me wants to reach out and touch him, just to make sure he’s really in front of me. But I don’t. Of course I don’t, because that would beweird.
I stare down at my UGGs, my sweatpants and hoodie.
I’m far from the girl he fell in lust with.
I don’t dare call it love anymore. Not even if, in the deep recesses of my mind, I know it was the only time I really let myself fall into that kind of love.
Scary, free-falling to my death, love.
The kind of love that came with consequences that I was still dealing with.
He looks over his shoulder and I suck in a breath as his eyes skate to the right of me.
I duck away from his line of vision, my back against the shelf of cereal boxes. The sugary one in my grip gives a little under the pressure of my fingers, as if clutching my daughters’ favorite breakfast would make the ghost of my past disappear.
All the years of regret slam into me, holding me where I stand. I hold a piece of my present life while my mind fills with a past I’ve tried so hard to forget.
Without a backward glance, I drop the cereal box and rush out of the grocery store.
Abraham Pugliesi is back.
And he’s chasing me out of grocery stores.
As I get in my car, I think about beginnings and endings and how no one ever got to know how we began or that we’d ever even ended.
Our existence only existed between the two of us, and that’s the saddest part of it all.
