Of a book in winter

She was always a creature of habit. A simple girl who always drank coffee from the same place, shopped at the same stores, watched the same TV shows, worked at the same hours, even loved the same people. Reading the old book by the window during the coldest days of winter was just another of those habits she couldn’t be bothered to change.

The book was a collection of poems, she’d never been much of a poetry reader but she liked those for reason she couldn’t quite explain. They gave her the feeling that the writer was thinking of her, of her life, when he wrote them. But mostly, her attachment to the book was firmly rooted on the fact that it had been a gift, a farewell present that symbolized a promise that with time had gotten lost in-between spaces and sporadic phone calls.

Most thoughts about the sentimental value of the book were usually kept at bay. It was easier to just open it, avoiding the first page that contained a rather heartfelt message written in his beautiful handwriting, and let the words by a stranger work their magic. They were familiar, yet not close enough to cause pain.

But sometimes, when the snow refused to stop falling and the time barely passed, it was unavoidable not to think of the first owner of the book. A longhaired boy with the whitest smile and the sweetest laugh she’d ever encountered. He was special. It was hard to tell at first but with time it had become clear that there was no one quite like him, someone so close to perfection and yet so utterly flawed.

It was ironic, and somewhat cruel, how she’d left looking for perfection when it was already there. But she didn’t realize it for the longest time. It never came to her until he was just a book and some words scribbled in blue ink.

In those colds days she thought about what could have been. She wondered what would have happened if she’d come back, or she’d never left at all. Sometimes she would come to the conclusion that it wouldn’t have worked out anyways, they were abysmally different, from their believes to they way they drank their coffee. But other times her train of thought was different, more optimistic, she imagined them together, living in the house by the beach that he always wanted to buy and owning dog named Cherry like she always said she would.

She was careful. It was too dangerous to let the mind wander into the deeps of the past and the regrets. So she never let it go too far, to little children and anniversaries. The dog was the indisputable limit to that particular fantasy. She wasn’t much of glutton for punishment after all.

For the most part he stayed away from her thoughts. It was something that slowly started creeping into her mind whenever the snowflakes began to fall. It was almost routinely how those ideas bloomed in her head as the temperature dropped, but still it was surprising, how suddenly she would find herself musing over events that had happened in what seemed a different life.

There were short moments in which she would consider throwing away the book. As if it was responsible for the feeling that overwhelmed her whenever she remembered him. But those moments tended to disappear quickly. Maybe getting rid the thing would made it easier to forget, to brake the habit; but wasn’t a guarantee. Besides, it was good to have a reminder that life wasn’t always so plain, that could have been different, that it could’ve have poetry in it… and beaches… and dogs.