To be continued

It is all very strange, the things that happened, the stories that I never meant to share.

I had never imagined myself actually speaking these words out loud, let alone having an audience. But there she was, there we were, in the dim light, the small coffeehouse next to my place. She had told her story first, the words carefully crafted and almost forced. I knew she wanted an audience, someone to listen to her and comfort her for the loss and pains that she believed she had lost. For all the time that I’ve come to know her, I had never been the right person to tell the stories to. We have shaped our friendship around the things that we do together, the people that we meet together, the food, the jazz, the neighborhood that we live in.

I have learned my lessons after all. I have learned not to force feelings out, not to press for untold stories. I have learned not to care, not to mind too much business.

But it was that night, a night of magic, the time we had come to each other at the bus station that she chose to tell her stories, to someone as far as me. She had come to me with a hidden agenda, carefully disguised to fool.

She spoke of her pains, of her anger, of the desires.
That was when we fell into silence.
That was when I felt compelled to tell my story for the night to go on, for the connectedness that we felt to last.

There I was, there she was, in the dim light, the small coffeehouse next to my place. I spoke for the first time, of the inner fear, the weakness, the hurt, the pain, the losses, the regrets, the tortures, the self-tortures that went on every night, the hurt that stung on every bus ride to work. I spoke these words for the first time, to an audience.

She listened. She shook her head. She did not understand.
She did not understand the necessity of going this far for the punishment.
She felt for me. She felt for the pain and the losses. She felt the hurt and the fear. It was the tortures that she did not understand, the self-tortures that I had inflicted upon myself every night of the week, on every bus ride in the mornings.

I had never imagined myself actually speaking these words out loud to an audience. But there I was, there she was, in the dim light, the small coffeehouse next to my place. She had told her stories first. I told mine second.