"I met you on the 13th of October, a date I shall remember forever but that you will never remember. If there were ever a more fitting metaphor for a relationship then I cannot imagine it. You were smiling beneath the crimson lights of the bar, washing away memories I would later find out were of your ex-fiancee and the relationship you'd left behind. I was there reluctantly, dragged at the pestering of my friends for an evening of revelry I neither craved nor desired. My heart had already been broken ten times over in the course of the past few years and my desire for marriage and a lasting relationship was thoroughly buried. Yours was just beggining. I was older. You were younger. I was remembering. You were forgetting.
We were, from the start, ships drifting in opposite directions.
So of course it was to my great surprise when a friend of mine dragged you to our table. In the ensuing hours the alcohol would flow, far greater for you than me, and we'd fill the evening with tales and confessions of lost loves and broken hearts. Somehow, in the midst of beer drenched conversations and tear filled admissions, we'd find a moment in which our two hearts were joined by our hurts. Which in retrospect was perhaps not the greatest way of beginning a relationship and yet, there it was.
You could barely remember me the next day while I remembered you all too well. You barely wanted to venture a date with me given the grounds of our first meeting. And yet we found ourselves having drinks and meals, sharing laughs and joys, yet our ships still sailed by two different winds. I was tired of trying to marry. You were still, unexpectedly to me, seeking it with passion.
How ironic that in the end you were the one person I wanted to be with more than I'd wanted to be with anyone in years and yet I could not give you the one thing you wanted. Our destinations were far too different, our journeys taking us into different waters. And so, one day, our ships lost communications. That day you were gone, and my first true happiness gone with the whisper of the wind.
Which is why I find it so strange now to sit here, my journey having come full circle. I've returned to the port I departed all those years ago. Of course you have long found your destination and vanished over the horizon while I linger, alone once more. And yet I find that, somehow and perhaps miraculously, I have found the will to again commit. It is likely on account of you. If I hadn't known the pleasure of your company and the warmth of your voice, I might never have found the desire to give myself to a person, utterly and completely, again. Such a shame it took the loss of someone so incredible to make me realize that."
James Pemberton paused as he lifted his thumb from the recording button on his phone. For a long moment he stared at its screen, his eyes pinned to the file shining at him from behind the illuminated glass: To Christina. Finally his finger slid over the file, illuminating it in red before striking a final button at the side.
"Deleted," he grumbled as the file was lost into the ether. "If only memory was so easy to discard."
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