We Are Young

I still think this is crap, but I think it's because it's outside of the genre I typically write in. This is a blip of something I wrote during the day at work:

“Hey.”

The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. It was deep, mellow, and soft with some scratchiness to it that suggested a nicotine habit. I looked up.

His face was familiar; but, again, I couldn’t place it. I felt like I was waking up from a dream—like I had been sleeping my whole life and this man’s face was the first actual human face I was seeing. I blinked as my eyes watered from the tension growing inside my head. I then remembered that I was working. And then I remembered to breathe.

“How can I help you, sir?” my voice sounded too quiet. Regardless, he heard me. He smiled a broad smile that took up his entire face. His light blue eyes brightened as they focused on me.

“I’ve been looking for you, actually. You don’t know me?” he replied, his cool undertones vibrating my eardrums at the rate of a lullaby.

“No,” I breathed, hoping he wouldn’t leave because I didn’t know him, “You seem familiar, but I don’t think I know you.”

He bit his lip thoughtfully for a moment. What I would have given to be that lip… He snapped back to reality in an instant.

“You remember? We were sitting in that field and I told you about my sisters…It’s been so long since then. We were just kids. It’s taken me this long to find you,” he was rambling a little, but I couldn’t stop listening. Something was stirring in my memory: whether it had been in reality or dream, I knew him. I knew this now. But he was still talking: “I told you I would find you. I’ve been dying to meet you. You know, you’ve grown up quite beautifully.”

I blushed and gave him a slightly sarcastic look; but he was completely serious. The seriousness brought weight to his words and I felt tears well in my eyes. My memories of him flooded back, and I began to understand who he was and how incredible it was that he was standing here talking to me…in reality.

“I’m not asleep?” I asked. His thumb stroked the first of several tears off my cheek before pulling me closer. His sandy hair touched my forehead. I could almost taste his breath. Oh, yeah, I need to breathe.

“You’re definitely not asleep. I really am here. Did you miss me?”

My voice was lost as the lump in my throat grew. I had waited and missed him for years. He had been my childhood playmate and my angsty companion in my adolescence during my dreams.  I hadn’t seen him for a long time, though. I had assumed that other men—men in my reality had blocked him out. I supposed his active search for me had blocked me from his subconscious.

But I had thought of him on and off during my adult years. I often wondered if he had just been a figment of my imagination—an imaginary friend who only showed himself in my dreams.

I forced my voice to work: I croaked out a feeble, “I missed you so much,” before the water works really set in.

This wasn’t the way he was supposed to meet me. I wasn’t supposed to be a lower-middle class worker who lived paycheck to paycheck with a life consumed with student loans and loneliness. I was supposed to be someone powerful, magnificent, successful. As he looked at me, though, I saw that person reflecting back—power, success, beauty. He saw me for what I was on the inside the instant he had met me. He could still remember the child me and the teenage me, but now he had found the adult me; and he was satisfied. He looked completely happy. I felt completely happy because I knew him for all he was, too. And I loved him, as I always had. No one else in the world mattered anymore.

His forehead was warm against mine, and his lips brushed against my mouth as he told me that he had missed me, too. It was impossible to breathe.

But, then, he was gone. He didn’t walk away; he just disappeared. Gone. The man of my dreams had left me once more; but this time, he had left something: a paper in my hand with instructions lazily scrawled on them. The underlined words at the top of the small page read: “How to find me.” And the goose chase commenced.