43. I'll try hard not to pretend.

I had lost everything.

It had been such a long time since that first time I'd try to communicate with the ducks on the wooden-bridge.
We had written hundreds of postcards to each other.
I had used up Fivehundred eighty-eight postcards.
At the bottom of my drawer I saw the last one. It was shiny, red and blue.
My hands where shaking as I took it up and grabbed a pen.
I wrote:
Sometimes, it's just not that easy to let go of the past.
But I'm willing to try.
I'm leaving you now cause we are drowning and our hands don't even meet.
Goodbye.
La (Laura).

I erased it several times, trying to come up for some other way to write what I've ment.
But the words kept stuck. I had pressed the pen so hard that it just would'nt go away.
So I filled in the words again.
Tossed away the eraser.
I don't want to have to use an eraser in my life ever again.

My hands were shaking as I grabbed the postcard and went outside.
My mom wondered why I was in such a hurry, she wasn't even making stew that night.
I tried to cover up my numb face as I dissapeard out the door with some phony excuse.
The city was dark.

The streetlights blinked and I ran and ran in a daze thru the streets of my neighborhood.




Sometimes you get exactly what you want.
I had that.
And what do you long for then?
Did it make me happy, did he make me happy?
Yes.

I was happy.
Then I stopped being happy.
And after that I had nothing left.
No longing nor happiness.
So I had no way out but this.

But I will not mourn for you.

I had two options.
The first one was to hide under the bridge with the ducks and taste green in my mouth for the rest of my life.

No.

The second and final one was to let you go and for you to let me go.
It just took more time for me.

This is the last postcard I dedicate you and your upperlip and our world.

He had changed.
Had I changed?

How could you not change?
As we move foward, as we grow up for real, we change.
It was a scientific fact.
He had told me that.
It made much more sense when he said it.
I tried to belive it.
I really, really tried.
Had I changed?

Maybe I was too stubborn to realize it.
Maybe he only saw my inperfections and I could just see his.
We could never see our own.

I held all the fivehundred and eighy-nine postcards in my arms.
It was spring.
My hair had grown down to my waist.
When I met him it nearly touched my shoulders.

I had the last postcard in my back pocket.

The sun was up, it was sunday and the city was still sound asleep.
I ran thru the streets of my neighborhood. The smell of stew was in me.

My mom had'nt made stew for at least a year. I could still smell it.
I ran thru the streets of my neighborhood holding fivehundred eighty-nine postcards in my arms.
They were not originally mine. It was his postcards, the ones he had sent to me.
I was out of postcards.
It was the last one that I had written my goodbye on.
I ran up to the big, metal bridge where we had spend an early morning just like this one.
But this time I was alone, I had my own leather-jacket on and I was not acting silly.
I was dead serious.

I stared at the raising sun.

It stared back at me.

I stared at the clouds. They were shaped like erasers.
I hated them for it.
Under me the flood was passing.

Millions and millions of gallons of water under me.
Fishes, boats and rocks trapped under the eternal horizon that was facing me in the distance.
I leaned out at the edge.

My arms were directly over the freezing water.
The postcards feared for their lives.

I tossed them out in the air.
The wind from the sea passed at exactly the same moment.
Five hundred eighty-nine postcards where flying in front of the sunrise.
The memories of my adolescent love was giving me it's final spectacle before fading away.
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Even though they were going to die in a matter of seconds, the postcards were free.
One by one they fell into the icecold waves.
My infatuation had just been murdered.
Goodbye love. Goodbye adoration.

You left my hands shaking and the ducks wondering.


It was then she let the postcards go.






It was that night she made them all slip away and moved to another city, made the final piece of the puzzle complete.

I stood at the central station with all my life packed into three bags.
I tried to dile your number. I did not call. I could'nt. Of course.
I'm a coward. I admit it. I'm used to it.
You can't expect anything else.

The train came to take me away from the resturant, the ducks, the bridge, the murdured postcards, The Shins, the green rain, the thin leather jackets and the pure, coldhearted misery.
I stepped on the first frame of my new life. I erased your phone number and decided that from now on nothing in my life would be about you. The doors closed. I was off.

But in life, nothing is ever complete, not that easy.
She moved, took the train to new destinys, new lives and what not.
It was time well spent. It was time away from all the love and misery and mess she had poured out on her city. This was a brand new city, with no history.
Her mother called. She said she was cleaning the apartment and had found a postcard of some kind under one of the rugs in the hallway. She said that it was adressed to her, Laura.
She felt the chills all over her body. What would it say?
During the holidays she travelled home.
She spent all her time on the train wondering of what could have been.
It was an ridiculous thougth.