Oh but it was only sentiment.

It is the knowledge that is comforting.

You are surrounded by a motley crew of midnight faces, boys and girls enraptured in the moment. She is there, across the room. She doesn’t look at you, and you don’t look at her, but somehow you know she’s there, that there is a secret world shared by the two of you, and beneath all her butterfly charms, you hope she is there with you, that some part of her tender heart is yours and yours alone.

And sometimes you wonder if you’ve imagined it all, if this is just one a big illusion. Days pass without a sound. You resist. Is she dead? Does she care? Is this just sentiment? Then you run into her one day, you catch her tired eyes and light frown and you break, and a nonchalant greeting becomes conversations becomes confessions becomes a day lost in her eyes, and it’s as if you’ve stepped into a bubble with her, where everyone outside of it are no more.

It’s summer. A Friday. Early night. You’re with her alone, sitting in a bar, having a drink when you see her lean back, and her skirt pulls back a little and you notice how perfect her thighs were, and you couldn’t tear your eyes away. You wonder what it’d be like to trace your finger from her knee and up, all the way up. Would she groan? Would she sigh. She looks at you, you look away. Has she seen?

You bring her there, to where in better days you had sometimes sat with a beer with other girls, those were the days before you got eaten by life and became old, you bring her here because the familiarity of the place gives you comfort during the awkward processions of the evening.

You had met her six months earlier, and loved her for six days. She tells you what she did before, who she did. Conversation about food. Family. Work. Vapid admissions. Vacuous plans. She is telling you the same stories and you realize how much and how little you know her. So you listen, and fixate on your drink, and let the languid night go by.

You see her again the next day, and the next, and the next. Perhaps it was selfish and petty of you to have thought it, but that secret world of yours is no secret after all. You’re only the latest denizen.

You had moved to city some desolates years ago. You’re not young anymore, after a wasted youth. This city is your sentence. But then you met her. She made you long for a bigger world and you’re thankful. The prison cannot hold you after all.