46. His side of the story.

Looking back at sunsets on the Eastside
We lost track of the time
Dreams aren't what they used to be
Some things slide by so carelessly

Smile like you mean it
Smile like you mean it

And someone is calling my name
From the back of the restaurant
And someone is playing a game
In the house that I grew up in
And someone will drive her around
Down the same streets that I did
On the same streets that I did

Smile like you mean it
Oh no, oh no no no
Oh no, oh no no no

(the killers - smile like you mean it)

She saw him one day, across the street.
He looked at her and smiled, and she knew that he ment it, that he had moved on aswell.

45. I belive in anything that brings you back, hauting me.

The park was empty of people and the clouds had turned darker above her head.
He was there, sitting in his Shins t-shirt watching the ducks give him sympathetic looks.

She sat down beside him and even though they had not met for months there was no need for introductions, hugs, kisses or something in particular to be said or done.
Even so he looked at her feet beside his and started to talk.

-When I came back this fall, I walked by the sewar, you know, where the water from the big bridge ends up before running out into the ocean?

-Yes.

- It was the oddest thing I´ve seen.
There were about fourhundred postcards in a bunch, cloging the water.

- Fivehundred. Fivehundred eighty-nine postcards.

- I figured it was you.

- You are correct then, mister.

- I´m sorry.

- It´s ok.

And it was. It takes time to neautralize a person you have felt almost every feeling towards.
But time makes you forget and it makes you realize what was real and what was not.
They were real, but in a way that legos are real for a 4-year old kid.
It´s more magical from the inside, at that time in your life.
Afterwards you see the scraps, the bad parts aswell as the good.

- How´s your girl nowadays? , she asked sincerly.

-I don´t think she´s my girl anymore, she never calls or anything.

- Yeah, I know the feeling. Sometimes people just stop. I belive that it goes in cycles.

Ouch, message recieved. I know that I was a jerk, and I´m sorry for it. I just. can´t.

- I know. It´s ok. You grow out of it, life goes on, you forget.

- Maybe you do.

- Yes.

- But I´ll never forget you. Or grow out of love for you. Don´t you know that you´re my first?
First love that is. You never forget your first love.

- You don´t?

- You do?

- I think I just did.



She was free. And it did´nt hurt, she did not feel empty or ashamed or embarrased of the words that had just came out of her mouth. She did not feel regret or sorrow, nor for her or for him. She knew that she was in his mind aswell. That was enough.

- Will you forget about me completely?

- Your silence makes it impossible to forget you completely, babe.

44. If you love me, won't you let me know.

December 27th, this year.
She walked the streets of her neighborhood for the first time in a long time, pulling the suitcases behind her, hoping that she had made the right desition.
Cause she was not one to do this for love or something else that is also silly and made-up.
She left her suitcases in the stew-filled apartament on the third floor, where she read the postcard. It was beautiful but they both knew that it was too late for it to matter.
She kept it, like an last souvenir from her adolescent love and adoration.
Followed her shoes to the park. Not much had changed in her city since she had left it.
The houses seemed brighter, the people looked nicer but the streets still revealed the stonecold misery of all the heartbroken lovers who had walked on them at 4.33 in the morning.

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.

42.I belive love will soon come to me, it´s building up in me.

I have managed to realize that the sum of people who actually leave your life for good are very few.
The most of them live on, in a different way, in another city or like a silent explosion in disguise. They live on, just like I do.

If he forgets me I am not going to dissapear.
I am still here living my life crowded in with 6 billion other people in the world.
So is he.
If I manage to meet him as all these similar lives all over the planet keeps going on living, breathing and bumping into other lives, then so be it.
But the way we were then, when we were young and in love and senseless, giving ducks lessons in sympathy, that time has died in the presence.
Every now and then we try to deny our past.
Maybe it´s too hurtful to realize that we in the past felt so strong
for the people who would come to hurt us so much in the future.


My new lover found out that neither my heart or my skin, my lips or my eyes were dedicated to him.
That I had lost it that night at the party, someone had told him what he knew all along.
That I was pure misery. That I would hurt him. He said he didn´t care, that it was ok but I knew that it was not.
He said he´d call. He did not call. I do not blame him and I do not blame myself either.

41. And it hurts with every heartbeat.

(back at the party, facing him once again and when he said ”i still love you, you know, i will never take back those words in the park.”)

He continued;

-But I could see that you moved on and so I decided to do that aswell. And it was fine, I was happy, I guess, but then I saw you with him and I just lost it. Why did I do that?

- Someone once told me that ”sometimes, it's just not that easy to let go of the past.”
she said.
- But we should try it.
- Yeah, we should.
- I think we kind of are.
- Me too.
(...)
- But I still miss you.
- Me too.

They looked into each others eyes and decided not to be sane so they left together.
All the sense ran out of them and the night took over, turning them back into who they where then, temporarly.
By the mornings clean light she woke up, stared him right in the face and realized that maybe neither was he so the man she wanted to wake up next to.
He awoke, looked into her eyes and she could see that he was struggling with both a hangover, aswell as the toughest desiction in the history of modern love.

He whispered:
- this is it, isn´t it?

-I think this was it a long time ago, we´re just to slow to figure it out.

- I don´t know what I want.
- I don´t know either.
- Maybe I want you.
- But I don´t think I want you anymore.

It was mean and it was hurtful but she knew the second those words came out of her mouth that they were, in fact, true.

A drunken kiss or a song of despair or both or nothing or everything,
everything, every single day for the rest of their lives would not be enough. She was free to waste away alone.
But she was not alone, she was not alone at all and therefore that night she spent with her arms wrapped around her new lovers waist and her nose laying next to his neck. It was were she needed to be.

the truth:
It was not you that had my heart in a
mess, it was me.

40. In another time the sky will burn and we will see if you need me then.

It was real. Everything I had wanted for so long stood in front of me asking for a second chance. Someone that I had been obsessing of for so long, I had been dreaming of him during the nights and looking for his footsteps during the day. He stood there, with a new look in his eyes, ready but still very secure of himself, asking me to fall for him all over again.

I punctured my heart for you. I could not breath for months.
You made me so so angry and depressed and happy at the same time.

I missed you for so long.

For such a long time that I forgot who I was, where I lived, who I used to talk to and what I used to do.
Your love ate me up. It swallowed me whole and consumed me completely.
I had never felt that kind of heartbreak in my entire life and I dont think that I´d survive it a second time around.

That´s what I would have said to him if I was a braver version of myself. But I´m not.
I am a coward and maybe I will always be. I don´t care, actually.
Even though I could not say the words thru my mouth they shined clearly from my eyes.