Screen Dreams
by Robert Aquino Dollesin
He enters the train terminal first, crossing the floor with his suitcase. Just in case. Moments later, also lugging a suitcase, she pushes through the front doors, stands beneath the arrivals and departures board and scans the bustle for someone she’s never met.
He spots her, or so he believes it is her, and slowly approaches.
“Taylor?” she asks, when he stops directly in front of her. He does not look like ‘her Taylor.‘ The up-and-down motion of his head causes the skin on his neck to jiggle.
“Marisol?” She is considerably older, he thinks, than her photographs had suggested. She certainly was not demure, or petite. Her hair being neither long, nor black.
They both set their suitcases on the floor to shake hands. Neither of them wears a wedding ring, both have noticed. She perceives his grip to be weak, he considers her hand plump.
After a moment of awkward silence the couple release each other’s hand. She checks her watch. “I can’t stay long,” she says. “You know, the old man might get suspicious.”
Clearing his throat, he replies. “I should be going in a bit, too –.” He smiles, weakly, and she does the same. “– before the wife starts worrying.”
Side by side at a small bar, the couple have a drink. Neither, though, says much. Funny, he thinks, how easily conversation had flowed online. Crazy, she figures, to somehow grasp for affection from someone you’d never really met.
They finish their drinks, both of them slip off their stools and heft their suitcases. Together, almost as a couple would, they walk out the terminal doors. Before going their separate ways, they once again exchange weak smiles.
Taking separate routes home, both he and she are struck by a sad awareness. Their months of netplay had been more of a lie than the world they hoped to escape. And both of them now know — he, while he climbs into a cab, and she, while staring out the bus window — it is impossible to change with such ease the lives they are destined to live.
No longer, he thinks, leaning back on the bench seat and crossing his ankles, can he be called ‘Johnnylonely.” She, with her forehead pressed against the window, thinks about her own screen name ‘Carolneeds.” She’d have to discard that now that things didn’t work out.
These small changes, however, would have to be handled more carefully than the larger change they had hoped to make by meeting tonight. As would the incomplete lives they would continue to live, lives which had led them to search out one another in the first place.
May 29th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Nice piece, Robert.
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