24 Hours

It is the imperfections that make her beautiful. The stretch marks on her hips and the soft flesh of her stomach. The smattering of freckles across her nose. The scratches and scars on her legs and arms from years of eczema. The dimple she gets on her left cheek when she smiles at me like she loves me. That high-pitched laugh. The washy grey of her eyes.

These are the things that make her beautiful. Because these are the things that make her, her. My Rebecca.

Although she’s not mine anymore. I keep forgetting that.

Right now she is standing in front of me at the foot of my bed, with her arms crossed and her eyebrows furrowed. I know that this means she is angry, but she won’t yell. She never yells. She talks things through calmly and sometimes she lets a few tears escape. I never can tell when she’s actually crying about something because she’s upset, or when she’s just being melodramatic or trying to make me feel guilty. I know for a fact that she can cry on cue. I’ve seen her take advantage of it before.

That’s the thing about long-term. You can pick up on these habits. People become predictable. The slightest, most subtle of movements or expressions can tell you so much.

Take Rebecca, for example. I knew as soon as I heard her familiar knock on my window, that she was here because she was angry at me. Though God knows why. Like I say, she’s pretty dramatic at times. We’ve been broken up for six months without so much of a word to one another and then she just turns up one Tuesday morning at 5am, on my doorstep, looking all angry and beautiful and walking into my parents’ garage like she owned it. It’s infuriating.

And anyway, she dumped me.

“You’re selfish,” she said evenly, her eyes fixated just north-west of my gaze, as if I was boring her. I’ll admit it was not what I expected her to say to me right now, but I let her finish. Mostly because I had been rudely awoken by the frantic knocking on the door and it was still far too early to be processing any of this. How did she always look so good in the mornings anyway? It’s just not fair.

“And you’re thoughtless and you’re unambitious and you have a horrible taste in movies and haircuts,” she finished. I thought I almost saw a smile for a half a second as she perused the shaggy bed-head look I was sporting, but then it slipped and she looked at me with those sad, cloudy eyes. “But I miss you, Al.”

I shook my head and cracked a faint smile. This is so classic Rebecca. She always wants everything to be like a soap opera or a cheesy 80’s film. Ever the hopeless romantic.

She took a step closer to me and took my chin in her hand, forcing my eyes to meet hers. They were so expecting. For that moment she just looked so vulnerable and beautiful and perfect that I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her all over and hide her away from all of the terrible things in the world.

But I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything. So, in a move so quintessentially ‘Rebecca’, she continued to talk. “I miss going to sleep with you, and I miss waking up with you. I miss getting thrown out of fancy restaurants with you and playing the giant/pixie game and getting lost on the way home from the cinema and having sex in your car in the woods.” A playful smile crept across her face. I could explain to you all of these games and these incidences of public indecency but it wouldn’t matter anyway because it won’t change anything. It’s not significant to this story, although obviously it is significant to me and to her and to us.

I let myself smile. And then I cleared my throat and I said, “I miss you too, Becca. I really do. I miss everything about you. Every damn thing. I miss getting tonsillitis with you and staying in bed together for three solid days. I miss the weird way you eat Kit-Kats and the way you always insist that Rome is in Greece. I even miss the annoying things like how you never make the bed and the way you make everything so dramatic, and I miss counting the freckles on your back, and I miss arguing with you over stupid things just so that we could make up again. I miss you even though you’re messy and you have romanticised and unrealistic ideas of relationships and you show up at my house at 5am even though we’re broken up.”

This time I definitely saw a small laugh. It was wonderful. “And I guess I miss you even though you’re unromantic,” she replied, taking her hand from my chin and placing it cautiously on my waist. “And you complain too much. And you spend too much time with your friends.”

“Well you are controlling, and you’re manipulative, and demanding.” I calmly interlocked my fingers with hers. “But I miss you anyway.” Not once did we break eye contact. I guess it was established that we missed each other. You can probably tell that much.

But then, in a flash, a 360 of emotion, I saw tears form in the corners of her eyes and for once I was pretty sure that they were genuine. She looked down, as if she had just remembered it. “But you left me for New Zealand,” she said. Her voice was soft, almost a whisper, and it had finality. She had won that one. We both knew it. She wasn’t laughing anymore.

Now, there was a silence, in which we had our arms around each other’s waist and our other hands entwined, and Rebecca kept looking down, and I looked up towards the ceiling and let out a long sigh.

“We were good together, weren’t we?” she finally asked, taking one final step to close the gap between our bodies, and gently resting her head on my chest.

I tightened my grip around her and stroked her long, dark hair down her back. “We were very good,” I answered. Already I could feel the moisture from her tears soaking through my shirt.

She inhaled. This one was the big one. The question I knew she really came here to ask. I closed my eyes and kissed the top of her head and waited for it.

“Then why did you leave?”

I let it hang for a while. Not because I wanted to build any tension, or make her suffer. But because I simply didn’t have an answer. I’d been thinking about it a lot over the past six months, I really had. But I still hadn’t come up with anything definitive. Nothing that could justify my behaviour to the girl that I loved and had loved for three years. Nothing.

But I couldn’t say nothing. I couldn’t just leave it. So I offered the best answer that I had.

“Because...” I let out a breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding. “Because I was curious. I thought that there was more to life than these four walls. I thought I’d been missing out on something.”

I’d expected New Zealand to be this life-affirming journey that would change me forever. But it wasn’t. I did incredible things over there; I swam with sharks, camped under the stars, saw breathtaking landscapes and met amazing people from every walk of life. I took everything that I could from New Zealand but I haven't changed, not really.

It’s just like Rebecca said; I am still the same selfish, thoughtless, unambitious person that boarded that plane 6 months ago. All that’s really changed is the tan of my skin.

Maybe that’s all that ever changes. Maybe we all stay the same people on the inside but our hair colour or our weight or the pallor of our skin changes as we develop. Perhaps you can’t change who you are. You just have to accept it and carry on with your life.

Rebecca looked hurt. I expected her to come out with ‘so I wasn’t a good enough reason to stay?’ or something of that nature. But she just stayed silent. Which I think is worse.

“I regret it now,” I admitted, pulling away from her so that I could see her face. Her beautiful, round cheeks and her crooked nose and her dimple and her grey eyes and the blemishes on her chin that made her so perfect. “I wish I hadn’t left you.”

She let out a sigh and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. My hands were still interlocked between her fingers. They were our hands. We moved together, like one.

“But you did,” she replied. “You left me.”

I swallowed a lump in my throat and held her gaze and her hand and hoped against all else that she would tell me it wasn’t over yet, that we could make this work and we still had a chance and she loved me and would always love me.

She didn’t. She just looked away and sniffed and closed her eyes.

And this is the exact point at which our roles reversed and I became the hopeless romantic and she became the sensible one.

“We can be good together again,” I said desperately. It was pathetic. It really was. I hated myself for it. But in all honesty I just wanted her back. I wanted to be able to hold her like that again and kiss her whenever I wanted and tell her all about everything.

She shook her head and pursed her lips together.

“I can be different,” I continued, fighting a losing battle against my tears and Rebecca’s mind. “I can be more romantic. I can complain less. I can spend less time with my friends.” My heart ached. Physically ached. I wasn’t aware that that could happen in real life.

When we had decided to part, all those months ago, it had hurt me. But I always thought that there was that chance, that glimmer of hope that I would come back and Rebecca would turn up on my doorstep, just like this, and she would give me another chance.

Back then she told me she didn’t want to hold me back. She said if I was going to go then I should go with no commitments, no strings, to really experience the world alone. It was disappointing. I couldn’t even think about other women while I was there. She was on my mind constantly because I loved her and not even New Zealand would change that. I didn’t feel like a single man. I thought about her all the time.

After all, the only reason we really split up in the first place was because of me leaving. Basically she couldn’t stand the thought of long distance and I just didn’t trust her not to replace me while I was gone. There it is. That’s the honest to God truth, though I would never tell her that.

A person like Rebecca doesn’t tend to wait for things. If she wants something, she goes out and she gets it. She doesn’t dwell on things like I do, or like most people do. Like I said, she’s spontaneous and she is ambitious. And sometimes that’s a great thing. But sometimes it is a huge concern and with my low self-worth as it is, I just couldn’t stand the thought of her growing bored of a long-distance relationship and going out with her friends and bringing guys home.

Which she probably did anyway. But that’s none of my business now.

Rebecca sighed again and looked up at me with her dewy eyes. I could barely even see her through my own tears. I hated that I was crying. I haven’t cried for seven years. My entire adult life.

“I don’t want you to change for me,” she said softly. “I want you to be you. Because you are wonderful, Alex. You really are." She paused. "I'm not the only girl in the world, you know." She wasn't, but she was the only one that I loved. "One day you’re going to meet a wonderful girl and you’re going to make her extremely happy. But it’s not me. We both deserve better, Al. You deserve a girl who is patient, and understanding, and supportive. And I deserve a guy who puts me first. We’re not meant to be together. We’re just too different. It doesn’t make any sense, don’t you see?”

I did see. It didn’t make any sense. But love doesn’t always have to make sense to be wonderful. That’s the brilliant thing about love. It is, as they say, blind. Right now I felt like I had been blinded, like I had been beaten and bruised and had bleach thrown into my eyes as I lay gasping for a final breath. What was she doing to me?

“Then why are you here?” I asked, choking through the lump of confused emotion in my throat.

She gazed off again and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she whispered. A single tear rolled down her cheek and died on her rosy lips. Those used to be my lips to kiss as I pleased and now all I could do was stare at them longingly as the only girl I ever loved stood just out of my reach. “I really don’t.”

It isn’t fair. I went to New Zealand expecting my life to change. And it had changed. And I had lost the best thing that ever happened to me as a result.

“I suppose,” she continued, with a small shrug, “I just thought you should know all of that. I thought we should have a proper goodbye.” She squeezed my fingers with her own. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“I don’t want to say goodbye,” I said childishly, pulling her back into my torso. “I want you to stay with me.”

Rebecca gave me a sad smile but there was no dimple. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she replied. She reached up to her tip-toes and planted a soft, perfect kiss on my left cheek.

“Goodbye, Al,” she whispered.

And then she let go of my hand and walked past me and out of the door. I didn’t fight for her. I didn’t scoop her up in my arms and kiss her until she changed her mind. I just let her go. I had my chance and it had slipped away.

And just like that, she had slipped away too.