Until We Meet Again

August 18th 2000

To wake up at two in the afternoon had become regular for Gerard. Still without a job, and with Katherine now working, loneliness and boredom often consumed him, a mix that along with the desire to drink didn’t help him to get through with the days.

It had been one month since the last time he had drunk and one month since the last time he had seen Jordan. Maybe it was time to clean up after the mess he had made and apologize to her. Again.



Jordan smiled at the bright interior of her mother’s oven. It had been a while since she had baked a cake a today she had felt like venturing herself in the kitchen.

Two loud knocks on the front door echoed through house. “Just a second!” She yelled, swiftly closing the oven with her leg, both hands carefully holding the cake’s pan.

She ran to the front door, opening it with a smile on her still reddened face from the oven’s heat, but a second later that smile was gone.

At first she was struck by the intense sunlight when she opened the door, but the humidity was noticeable was well, giving the hint that a storm was probably brewing. What she didn’t expect was to see Gerard standing on the other side of the door, and by the evident look of discomfort on his face, neither did he seem to have expected to be standing in front of her as well.

She studied him for a second, before any words could be spoken, and she knew immediately something wasn’t right.

“So…” His hands were immediately stuffed in his pockets. “I know I’m going to sound like a broken record, but I’m sorry.” His smile was only barely visible and it accentuated the dark circles under his eyes even more.

“About what?” Jordan leaned against the door frame. Part of her wanted to forgive him simply because he looked tired and frustrated, but the other part wanted him to learn his lesson.

“About everything I’ve said and done, I really wanted us to be friends again before you head back to London, which I know will be in a few days, right?”

“So are you going to tell me now what happened? You can’t just start to ignore someone or be mean because you feel like it, I know you’re not like that, so what happened?”

He thought about telling her truth, about using the same excuses he had used last time or blaming it on Katherine. The last one wouldn’t be right, the second wouldn’t make her happy and the first one would devastate her, so he choose to remain silent.

Jordan sigh seemed to made him come out of his thoughts and when he looked up she was no longer in front of him, a crack of the door however still open and the smell of something baked with cherries now reaching his nose.

Gerard was about to peek inside when Jordan appeared again, holding a small piece of paper on her hand and a somewhat doubtful look on her face.

“I’ve found this is one of my father’s newspapers.” She handed him the paper and he immediately recognized it as being a job advertisement. “I know, you’ve already told me that you don’t need my help, but -” she stopped herself and shrugged. “I know you’ll do the right thing.”

“Thanks.” The reply left Jordan somewhat surprised and for the first time since the beginning of their conversation, she smiled. A fat drop of rain hit Gerard’s shoulder and he knew it would rain before he could reach home. “Well, I should get going.” He turned to start walking toward his car.

“Do you like cherry cake?” Jordan asked out of the sudden, making Gerard turn to face her. “I’ve just made one, maybe you’d like to come inside.”

September 6th 2000

“And this, of course, will be only the first part. We’ll also introduce you to approaches from within stylistics and discourse analysis, and the ways in which specific linguistic choices create variations in style and meaning, the way in which linguistic choices can be evaluated from different theoretical positions. Some of the topics include Critical Discourse Analysis, Marxist and feminist perspectives on language, and intertextuality.” Dr Richard Allan, Jordan’s new professor, spoke calmly. He presented himself as a relaxed person and she immediately thought of him as a nice person.

The professor, in his mid fifties, kept on talking about the course, about the books they had to buy and how they would be evaluated, but Jordan wasn’t really paying attention anymore. This would be her last year before she graduated and, although excited, nervousness and doubt also assaulted her. She felt like in a crossroad, part of her wanting to stay in London after graduating and another part of her really wanting to go back to New Jersey and maybe find a job in New York. Would she choose to live the life she had envisioned for herself, or compromise in order to retrieve the person that she cared the most?

December 21st 2000

Jordan always preferred the winters in London to the ones in New Jersey, but spending Christmas away from her family, and Gerard and Mikey, was out of question. It was not like everything had become perfect again, her interactions with Gerard over the last four months had been summed to a few phone calls, and those could be counted on the fingers of both hands. Still, they were enough to make her happy, knowing now that he had found a job, not the one Jordan had told him about, and that he was no longer dating Katherine.

The latter hadn’t been told by Gerard himself, but by his brother, who had phoned her quite often during the time she had been in London. Of course she had played her part and had acted like she was sorry to hear about it, but she was relieved. It was not that Katherine wasn’t a good person, Jordan just didn’t know her enough to be sure of that and she, in Jordan’s opinion, had been the one to drive Gerard away from her. So of course she wasn’t jealous. Just relieved.

Brown boxes filled her parent’s living room, in an attempt to finish decorating the entire house for Christmas before all the relatives would arrive. In a couple of hours she would see Gerard and Mikey again and finally meet Claire, the girl Mikey had talked about on most of his phone calls to her and that was now his girlfriend. Jordan was trying to be excited about it, she really wanted to, but another subject kept on nagging her mind. One of her professors had offered her a job, an internship in her publishing company when she graduated, and she really didn’t know what to do. Did she really want to stay away from her friends and build a life in London?