Transitions

So you’ve come back from another town. I see your face painted with an eternally grim frown as if nothing’s right in the world, or perhaps in the immediate world around you.

Your words, soaked in anger, do not spare a soul. Souls whose trepidation you see and yet not notice, as if you sit behind a rose-tinted pane.

And so, here we are, watching every step, watching every word, wondering what pressed the push button of your ire.

Where did this angst come from? I’m still trying to search for the smile you had before you left these shores we walked. Perhaps you buried it years ago in this city while we were busy growing up, lost in our bliss or unraveling the chaos that quarter life ushered in. Or maybe you dropped it somewhere across the Atlantic. Even worse, maybe it’s changed form so much that I can’t even recognize it when it’s staring right back at me.

But no, I think you hid it in some vault and then lost the key. There it lies, eluding you, yet hoping you’d pick it up from where you left.

And yes, you’ve developed a knack of seeing the one wrong in a pack of rights. Must have been hard to master the skill; tell me, where did you learn it? Last I knew, it wasn’t there in our backyard. Could never have been. Was it too easy to unlearn and then learn to develop a critic’s eye, firing your barbs without hesitation? Was it difficult for an older you to replace the younger one?

I am hoping for an early rain, so that it beats down on the anger, and eventually razes the walls between us. I hope what I now see is just a veneer that would wear off with the cooling showers. My hopes may be utterly fantastic and fatally optimistic. For whatever this city lacks, optimism is certainly not one of them.