Knowledge.

She is staring at him from across the room, her lips clamped together in a thin line. He is always here at this time, and she cannot help but be here as well. Her books are laid out in front of her, with busy looking papers lifeless beside them. She really did come here to work, she tells herself. As soon as she sees his face the deceitful thought vanishes; there is no confusion about why she is here. His face is one that fills her with desire and a kind of desperate, clawing need. Of course he is the reason she’s here.
She knew him once…it feels like so long ago. It was then, in the time before, that she had lost her heart and found it again in his hands. If she had known that this would happen, that his pitiful state would be the end of such rampant emotions, she never would have given him a second look.
But she did. And she knows that ultimately she would not have changed anything. There was something tragic, yet beautiful, about the way things turned out. What with her loving him with a passion that poets write about, and him forgetting her easily enough. Though she cannot blame him- as she authored most of it in her head, building a novel upon words whose meaning she had twisted, and then being angry with him when he would not help her keep the lie standing. There were some words whose meanings she just couldn’t twist to suit her wants.
For a while, however, she thought things might end as she wished. She had thought that they could make it work, opposites though they were. She had once thought that she might have him in the end and that all her pain would not be for nothing. She wonders if he had ever believed so. It is doubtful, he was always the realist. He had been saying goodbye since he met her.
But would she love him if he were anything but that which he is? Of course not. She knew this. She did. She simply let his smile distract her for a while. It is perhaps his smile that she misses most. What she would enjoy first if she could have him back.
And she does want him back. Sitting here in the crowded shop, with her view of him distorted by the faces and bodies of strangers, she wants him back. Part of her knows that it is not worth it, that he would come with more than just a smile. He would come with pain, agony and a confusion of self- but she would gladly endure all those things. She would gladly accept a life of uncertainties and of confrontations if only to have him. She would leave behind all that she knew to be with him. She would set aside good judgment for him. She is in many ways like a petty child, wanting that which is bad for her and refusing to heed to the consequences.
There is a problem, however, in her fantasy world of wants: he does not want her. He has already made his choice, assuming there was one, and it was not her. It will never be her. This too she knows. As she absentmindedly stirs her now-cold drink with spoon it occurs to her that she knows an awful lot. She knows him. She knows what she wants. She knows the two are the same. She knows she cannot have him. She knows. She knows. She knows.
She is doomed to know.