Noodles

“You would offer me your unmade bed and I’d swear you could reinvent infinity,” Marcos said as he relit a melted candle. He placed it in a broken coffee mug and set it between the two plates of steaming linguini. “But that’s when we were kids, Gia. Why are you bringing this up now? I thought we were good.”

The woman snuggled in a recliner gave a pouty look before huffing a sigh and sitting up.
“Why do you always act like this is over? I know you, Marcos. You’re the only person who can really see me. You’re the only person that makes me nervous. Because once I say something— it’s like you etch it into stone. As if there’s some stone tablet of our relationship and you’re Plato. Can’t you see that I love you? Can’t that be enough?”

“It might be if you were with me. But you’re not. Maybe we aren’t the star crossed lovers you think we are. Maybe we were the comet’s tail— brilliant, brief spark across the sky. And that’s it.” He stuck his fork into the clumped pasta. It resisted his weak efforts to pull it apart. He stopped and looked up at Gia. “You can’t have everything. There’s always a trade off.”

”I wished you believed in love like you used to. It makes me sad that you lost the part of you I found most beautiful.”

“And I can’t hold out hope for a light when it helps you to keep the blinds shut.”

”Nothing in life is fair. But some of it hurts a lot worse than other stuff. And hoping in vain is the worst of it all. That’s the poison that will kill you with a smile on your face. It’s like climbing down from a peak— the view is beautiful, but you can’t live there. And one wrong move on the way down and it’s done.”

Gia got up and blew out the ragged candle in the mug. She looked around Marco’s loft and laughed. “You’re going to end up all alone. And even worse— you could have had me back, but you didn’t even ask.”

”Shouldn’t be the one asking if you’re the only one that can make the decisions that matter. Goodbye, Gia. Don’t forget to be kind to yourself.”

”Fuck you, Marcos,” Gia said as she swept out of the room.
“Fuck me, indeed.” Marcos drained his glass of wine and stared at the linguini. He was sure there was a metaphor tangled in the noodles about fate— but he was too hungry to care.