A Mere Observer

Less Than a Week

What's a graceful thing to say when your eyes are locked, both rimmed with surprise?

My mouth and my brain apparently couldn't figure it out. When I continued to hold my mouth open, making like I had something important to say -which I very well did, and very well should have- Trent's expression gradually dulled. The reality of the situation was beginning to set in. I had to act fast, it was imperative. Yet, my lips were molasses. In order to get something, anything out to the man I ran here for, I pleaded, "Trent."

"Mel," he said, his expression deepening. It deepened into confusion. He looked at me but with his eyebrows furrowed and his lips set in a frown.

I suddenly really missed the look he had when he first saw me.

He strode up to me through the bodies surrounding him, now watching him, now watching me. "What are you doing here?" he asked in a quiet voice that scared me.

I searched the area around us as if to find what I should say. Come on! I went over this in my mind a thousand times, but the look he was giving me made my hairs stand on end and my heart pound hard. In all my imagined scenarios, he would look at me in confusion, but never with a darkness to the April skies. His eyes now looked stormy.

"I- I was going to surprise you at the banquette."

He glanced down at my dress and the shoes in my hand then back into my eyes, the confusion never faltering. "What?"

"When I had the chance to stay, I made a plan to surprise you at the banquette."

The crowd behind us began to chatter. It made it all that much harder to think.

Trent was silent for a while, looking from the heels I held to the ground to nothing at all as he tried to sort everything. He ran a hand through his hair.

"You were here this whole time?"

"Well, yes-"

"And you never told me?"

"Well I was trying-"

I was trying to speak, explain, but his confusion and disappointment began to thunder in the storm and it drowned out my voice.

"Why wouldn't you tell me? I can't believe- we could've..."

Oh no. I was supposed to have this under control. I was supposed to use the new voice Trent helped me find and prove I was here because I cared.

He was hurt. I hurt him. Me and my midnight dress and sneaking around and Becca and the Omies and Lee and the cab and Seattle Sunset and diving in the middle hurt him. He was right here but I'd never felt so far away from him. I panicked.

"Trent, I didn't mean-"

There was a last call to board the rail announced from a voice above.

He shook his head in a way to tell me not to finish what I had to say. Who was this person? So upset and confused. I did this to him. Who was I? What did this make me? I wasn't a woman in a midnight dress anymore. I was a girl standing barefoot in front of a storm she created.

"Trent," I tried, but he shook his head again.

"I have to go, Mel."

"Wait Trent, just listen!"

"I can't Mel, I have to go."

Where did my breath go? I couldn't find it. And then I couldn't find Trent. He was absorbed once again into the crowd, all of which gathered onto the light rail. I ran to the doors as they closed and searched for Trent, searched for my breath but both escaped me. I felt someone's hands on my shoulders, pulling me back. In what seemed like less than half a second the light rail was gone.