The inevitability of possibilities

While sipping into my mug of coffee, I wondered how it would be to see you, right now, in front of me, like you used to be, in the world that was five decades younger. I spared a moment to feel how you felt, when my fingers reached out for the strands of your wispy brown hair; I remember then, how your pale skin would redden; but was it blush or an embarrassed glow, you didn't tell.

But then you didn't say a lot of things. I probably, always assumed you said them - often imagining them to be good - because it made “me” happy and “us” seem perfect.

I forgot that every coin has an another side, one that I, out of habit, rarely flipped to see. So when you didn't show up one day, I had to go back to the coin, you once gifted me. "It was a rare one," I remember you telling me. It had a lion's emblem on one side and it just seemed like anything ordinary. That day when you left, I turned it around...It was blank. Only the copper base was slightly roughed up, as if someone had on purpose, hammered the image that had been embossed. It was rare, I joked to myself. And you were so foolish, I wondered.

It's been such a long time since it all happened. So much water has flown under the bridge of time. So much water, so much...that now, you seem like a memory so vague that all I can think of is your brown hair and the white of your skin. I don't know nothing, otherwise; not even when we first met. May be, if I knew when exactly you came into my life, it would have been easier to remember when you walked out. But this "may be" was only a “possibility”, something I had stopped believing in after you went, until she came.

Now, when I see her feed me the last sip from my mug of coffee, I know the inevitability of possibilities. I want to reach out to her hair, but my hands have given in...aah failing nerves. But when she observes the way my waisted hand moves restlessly on the arm-rest, she lifts it for me, cups my fingers in the palm of her hand, and then slowly slides them into her greying strands. They are not as soft as yours...that I know. She does not even redden enough for me to discern. But another miracle happens, and only, I have seen. The wrinkles on her face disappear, and I can tell you, it is out of an odd pleasure. The pleasure of loving and being loved. This is rare, rarer than your battered coin.