Lessons Learned

Day pass and still she can remember his features exactly. Green-blue eyes. Nervous hands. They shake sometimes, but he doesn't know she notices. He knows so much, yet so little.
He sits, slumped, in his chair. Sitting back, relaxed- yet on edge. Dressed as always. It's an image she wants to keep. She shuts her eyes and conjures his picture once more, commiting it to memory.
It hurts her to think about what the future must inveitably hold. Years will pass. Different paths will be taken. Soon, all ties will lost. All that will remain will be what manages to stay locked in her memory.
He will forget her. To him, she will become but a whisper, an unsettling dream some late and sleepless night. He will forget her name. Lose the letters she composed, and sent. Perhaps he never even read them.
Fate will be cruel to them. The future will be a double edged sword of change and loss. It saddens her to think of it.
For now, she must hold to the chances, the time that remains. She will wait for the moments when their eyes meet, holding each other captive for those few, fleeting seconds. She will cherish the smiles granted to her, the laughter she is sometimes allowed. Each moment, a reminder of what might have been.
A reminder that love, in fact, does not take two. A reminder that respect and friendship do, at times, heal the wounds of rejection, of ignorence. A rejection born not of hate or digust, but a rejection of honesty and perhaps fear. Fear that she might make him feel something. And fear that, perhaps, she already has.

She stares into his eyes, a thousand questions clouding her vision. Questions whose answers left long ago.
He looks away, and she suffocates a little more.
The air around her is heavy, oppressive. The fiber of her being surges with urgency- but never desperation.
A deep sadness clutches her heart, or is it merely her imagination. Her love of the dramatic, the morose. The feeling holds to her with a cold, angry fist. Rather than shattering her, it lingers in its gripping ache.
She stands alone, waiting. Waiting for all of her to be numb. For everything to fade away, like mist over a great glassy sea. She waits for rushing waves to carry her to some forgotten, distant shore. She is always waiting.
His mouth moves, words hang in the air around her. They drug her into a cruel stillness. Nothing to say, even less to feel. Or perhaps too much. Empty.
His hand reaches towards her, uncertain. Unsteady legs carry her backward. Time does not wait.