Her one true love.

The night was a strange one. Not that it looked peculiar; it was the same mid December cold and the same darkness. But i could feel the liquid in the dark and the delicate web of silence spun around it waiting to be torn to shreds. The streets were empty and the cold wind almost felt like a mothers embrace for a terrified child. But, I couldn't let these thoughts play with my mind tonight. Tonight had been the most wonderful one ever. Because, it had brought with it a surprise, A surprise so absolutely wonderful. I had been scared, worried that with my luck even this near miracle would turn to an utter disaster. It had not, in fact it was so perfect that I thought that somewhere in my mind I had unconsciously planned it out the past eight years. It felt natural and startling at the same time to set my eyes deep into his.
Steven Falthrow. My childhood friend ,adolescence  crush and later my one and only desire. There was something peculiar about him,the way his golden hair sparkled in the light,the way he winked and laughed. There was nothing about him that I found heart breaking or disgusting, for me he was flawless and I was hopeless. For why, a handsome intelligent boy like Steven would ever even think romantically of an average plain looking girl like me. There was no sparkle in my small eyes, no shine in my dull black hair and I couldn't break hearts with a single smile. I was just another girl struggling through school then college and now my life. Always the one with her head down trying to look fabulous in her simple clothes and bearing a hundred desires in her hungry mind. He was my friend and i was his, we would share the deepest of our secrets tell each other about our love lives. Only I never gathered the courage to tell me how i really felt. I just looked into his deep eyes and I would be hypnotized. But never enough to give away my secret, I was like a murderess hiding her sin and horrified to even think about it herself. But then something happened, that changed me completely. He called me for dinner one night to a fancy Italian restaurant and over a platter of Carbonara he told me he planned to go to an art university in France. My heart flip flopped in my chest, as I asked him how long he will be gone. "Temporarily Ann I'll be back in time for Christmas for a while of course, and then when I'm done I’ll be back it’ll just take four years.!.". I tried to be happy for him, laughed so hard that he could not know that the wetness in my eyes was due to pain not joy. 10 years of friendship and that sweet secret love couldn't make me strong in fact i felt that all the bones in my body had been beat up to powder that if I even moved a finger I would shrivel to ashes. He did tell me he will miss me but I knew I was just a friend to him, surely he'd find a million beautiful French girls willing to be his friend and something more. It would never be the same when he would return, I was already not a significant part of his life then I would be nothing. I could at least be near to him but when he's gone I knew the distance would break each and every bond visible. What if he came back with a gorgeous blonde bearing his child? How would I bear the sight of that? My heart seemed to break deep in my chest. It was the end, and i could feel it like a fresh well deserved slap on the face. What was i thinking? Falling in love when I was no princess? Just because he had been a good friend I had taken it the wrong way. And so all the way back home, in the backseat of a cab I silently cursed myself and told him to stop at the pub downtown. At eighteen years of age, I was naive and hardly knew anything about drinks.  But that night, I didn't care of the stares I received but only cried buckets of tears and gulped shot after shot of whiskey mixed with tears. I remember stumbling into a cab and dragging my body home. I woke up to the horrible stench of vomit. My mother had left an angry note telling me I needed to be more responsible. But did I care? No. My world had collapsed around me. My head felt like a stone. 'Oh screw it. Screw my life and you Steve" I thought and threw my phone down the window. There I sat, in my room, for a whole month with food and water my only companion. I don’t know if he called or when he left but by the time I came out of the little bedroom. I was too hollow and numb to care. My mother did not care much for me, she had a social life to keep up and she was happy to hide her "weird" daughter from her "classy" friends. My father, well, I never heard of him.
But after another month, I met Stevens only relative, his grandma at the store. He had left of course and not contacted her. The poor woman died one night of a heart attack I went to her funeral, but Steven did not. He was always in my mind, but was I in his? Sadness turned to hate and as the seasons passed the hate turned to a sickening worry but one night I woke up from my sleep and clutched the phone to my ear.
"Ann I am fine. We will meet don't worry aite? Take care". Just a whisper. His voice, but when I opened my numb mouth to say something there was no one on the phone. There was no caller Id on my old phone but his voice was so real. I slept then and I think I never woke from that sleep. Maybe there was so much pain in my mind that it refused to wake up. I fought my way through a university got a degree in psychology and ended up working as a cashier in a shop. There was no meaning to life but there was no reason to end it as well. I felt free and caged at the same time. And there was definitely no love. Oh none of that. Only maybe men I ended in bed with in my drunken stupor, Men who vanished the next morning. Eight years passed in that trance, I left my mothers house for a small less furnished apartment and worked two and sometimes three jobs a day.
But that December night was different. I had been working as a waitress and I saw a figure standing in the dim light near the trash cans outside. It was past midnight already and a shiver ran through my spine. Not another man drunk to madness I thought. But as I got near I gasped, my windpipe froze. Those shoulders, those golden wisps of hair, oh it was him. My heart stopped, there was no life in me and my eyes froze, till the tears flooded. My Steven, after so many years of agony and hurt, so many years of endless hours of work, he was here. I didn’t know whether to be angry or smile, but I knew I would never go away.
"S-s-Steven?" my voice was only a hoarse whisper; I doubted he even heard it. But he had, he turned around and my racing heart seemed to stop like a running horse coming to a halt. His face, his face was so white so smooth and the eyes I stared into were deep as ever but hollow even. I felt lost, like falling right into, nothingness. He seemed to glow but that was just the light I thought. Whatever it was he seemed too fragile and I was hypnotized. I did not move a step but only watched as he stepped towards me. I had lost control of my body, tears streamed down my eyes, tiny sad voices escaped my mouth. "Oh Ann." He whispered, "Oh Ann, I missed you so. Won't you come with me? I think it’s too late now. But Ann oh i love you so. Please baby I am so alone" I thought he was drunk but the sincerity in his voice the pure pain was enough to make me tremble in my heavy woolen jumper. He wrapped his arms around my waist, his lips touched mine, but his touch was as light as a feather. I forgot who I was, forgot what I was doing, but before I could touch him back he had stepped away. "Where were you Steve? Why did you do this to me? I loved you and I still do!"
Tears. Tears they were, like little pearl drops falling down his eyes in sparkling streams.
Then his voice was filled with a sense of urgency. "Go now. Don’t mention this to anyone. Remember I love you." He walked away and Kristine my boss came outside telling me I was needed inside. She did not mention anything about the figure walking down the road, did not even glance at it. The rest of the hour passed away like a dream and here I was walking home alone at one in the morning. I was so stupid not to have asked anything, how would we ever meet again. The night still had not lost its strange liquidness and I tried harder to forget it. I walked back in my apartment changed into my nightshirt and lay on the covers wide awake. I repeated each word of his in my mind. Touched my lips where he had placed his. He loved me. At last he loved me. It was so perfect, the confession the kiss, just what I desired for so long. I don't know when I slept, but I think now maybe it was a dream.
He walked in through the window. Not the open window but through the glass. I saw him sit down on the soft bed but I did not feel his weight pressing on the mattress. He smiled at me, a kind of sad deep smile so unlike his own. And then I was falling, falling deep inside his eyes and before my eyes I saw a place. I saw my Steven with a suitcase in hand, gazing at the Eiffel tower and messaging. He was messaging me, that how the lights reminded him of the sound of my laughter. I watched his fingers tremble on the key pad as he typed. But I never knew, I never knew because I had thrown out my phone. He walked away from the tower and the crowds and I watched him sitting alone in a small café sipping his coffee. He got a cab then and directed the driver to some hotel in his broken French. I watched the scene unfold before my eyes the cab driver drinking whiskey from his Coke bottle, and the busy street full of cars and a few trailers. Then it happened, he turned into the wrong side of a one way road. I saw the bright blinding lights of the huge bus, heard the smash of the two metal bodies and the shattering of glass. Then I heard the sickening thud of bones against metal and saw in horror, my Steven. Blood flow out like lava from the cut in his head; it was thick blood so red that it was almost black. The driver was crushed between the cars top and his seat. Steven’s phone slid down and the cop in hurry ended up stepping on it, smashing it. I could hear the vivid noise of shouts and sirens. It was Steven, he gasped and shuddered like a fish outside water, blood flowed out of the corners of his mouth and I heard the death gasp, could almost feel his cold last breath on me. “No!” I shouted out in rage and pain. “Shh Ann. Its okay the worst is over now for where I am now there will be no hurt, no regrets and no relations.” I shivered down to the core of my spine. He was dead how naïve I was to not notice, the whiteness of his skin, the hollow nothingness in his eyes, the touch like air? My Steven was dead; my Steven was a ghost now. He was a spirit and once again so out of reach, so very near yet so far far away. But before the tears could take over, sense did. He loved me, so strongly that his soul followed me to confess. My hurt and pain was not in vain after all. I knew I could never touch him, never feel him besides me in bed, I would never be a mother to his child but he was mine and I, his. Not the world or the angels could tear us apart. I looked up and there was no one there anymore but outside the night seemed to solidify. The next morning I brought a bouquet of fresh flowers, red roses, tulips and daisies and wrapped them with a blue ribbon. I lightly wrote my name on it then his, kissed it and placed it at the door of his old house.
Oh how I wish to tell you his soul lived with me. I wish I could say how a spirit and a human combined but that would be a lie. Stevens’s spirit never returned, and I left that town ten years after, for France. There was nothing big there for me of course, and I worked there just as before only perhaps I was paid more. I never married for there was too much love in my heart for him there was hardly space for someone else, or so I thought. I fell in love once again and I am glad to say I was the proud bearer of a mother’s heart. I had a baby, my Ryan, and I knew I loved him just as much as Steven. Ofcourse he was an accident after a new years party but one that I was glad happened. I am happy to say Ryan found his lady and they had wonderful children. And did I mention his eyes? Oh they were just like Stevens, when he was alive. A lived a full life of eighty years and amongst all the joy and love for my son there was a sharp shard of windscreen glass stuck in my heart, it hurt so bad. Each night I wished, prayed to God to be reunited with the love of my soul. Maybe it was that invisible shard of windscreen that did it, but I died with a minor heart attack on the 12th of August 2009.
I have to tell you something. When they say love is not real, don’t listen to them. For true love knows no limits, its like a free bird in a clear sky and though it brings pain remember that it is a rare special feeling so keep it close to your soul. Even if you don’t, it won’t run away for it is a part of you now. I am happy now, I look down to earth and smile for my little grandchildren, but I look around here and laugh. Oh it is wonderful he was here when my last breath escaped and so gently did I land in the land of the dead. There is no hurt here, no lies and no suffering only love and passion and Steven. Now I can sleep next to him, and no I am no longer old don’t picture an old woman kissing a young lad you! Everyone here is at their height of youth and his eyes so full of sparkle so full of the sweetness after death. I wish you all good luck, may you find love and receive it.