Weaving Princess【織姫】

Their eyes met. He jolted in recognition.

This is the man she would have married had she not married another already.

Her friend re-introduced them to one another at a brunch in the Meatpacking District. Between his husband and work, he had little time to spend with friends and decided to merge friend groups.

He wanted to announce he and ***** had finally found a surrogate while they were all together, but her and her ex couldn’t help, but stare at one another, paying little mind to what he was saying until he was drowned out as the memories of the two of them together resurfaced.

‘What are you two doing? Are you listening to me? I’m going to have a baby. I’m going to be a dad!’

He coughed, ‘Sorry.’ and she readjusted the white cloth napkin on her lap and interjected:

‘Sorry, it’s just, well—you see—’

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They knew one another briefly. She spent her senior year of high-school studying abroad in Warsaw. He was the son of her host family.

Two years younger than her, but a fast friend, they spent many hours together roving from concert to taxi to club to one am pierogis at Zapiecek. Wherever their hearts and legs took them, they giggled all the way in that small, carefree way of children who were still safely wrapped up in their soft cocoon away from the world outside of their one school building; where one could be noble-hearted and unhypocritical, where even the most critical and cynical of them could look up into the expansive sky and daydream of a more peaceful future, even in the coldest hearts of clouds.

All the future lay ahead. It was open. It was optimistic. In those rosy, halcyon days before the clouds had settled into a fog that obscured the way that seemed to lead straight to their dreams;

before life revealed it would not always turn out as one hoped;

before they got turned around;

before they lost one another in misunderstandings and still tried to find one another in the distance,

calling one another all and every night;

before those pauses in between stretched out like a sunset’s long shadow;

before it slowly turned to them calling each other like the labored ticking of an unwinding clock,

first one night, then the next dripped by, and—

‘Sorry, I forgot to call this weekend. I was hanging out with college friends and lost track of time.’

First one week, then two passed before they could get through to one another again:

‘I’m sorry. I’ve just gotten so busy. I’m trying to apply to colleges over there—Huh? What do you mean? I know, but I want to—’

They started to lose sight of who each other were:

Who had they once looked forward to speaking with all week long?

The longer they were away from the time they had loved, the mist grew thicker and thicker, obscuring the other’s portrait in their hearts and they wondered why they were still together.

Before a murky wall expanded and they could no longer get through to one another;

before they decided to no longer hear one another out;

before they stopped trying to find each other and started shouting;

before they were no longer afraid of losing one another forever;

When their long distance phone calls from the pay phone ended with a kiss to the receiver:

when they still got cut off by the operator because they had run out of quarters and ćwierćdolarówkas;

and the soft whispers cut out at dawn; before they started cutting one another off;

before they put one another down quite brutally;

before she slammed the phone down;

before it echoed and hurt his heart to hear that they had gotten caught up in the busy signal of their bustling lives; before he called as if to make up and then slammed the phone down and screamed, ‘She wasn’t breaking up with him! He was breaking up with her!

‘She was not who he thought she was.’

Before their time on the payphone had run out in the middle of his tirade;

before those words echoed over the phone after he had hung up and the off-hook tone interwove with the recorded, ‘Sorry, you’ve been disconnected.’

(That would be the closest thing to an apology that she would ever hear from him for cheating on her again.)

Before the end of their first love;

before the fog unveiled the first morning they wouldn’t be together ever again;

before life revealed to them that people were not always as they seemed

and no one always wants what they thought they would always have:

Before all those moments came to pass: they had believed that the worst of storms could only rain roses.

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And what had there been to contradict that idea?

Not the many hours which they passed together in that past age that seemed more brief a time as they grew older. There had been nothing to contradict that even through their last morning together.

Because on their last night together, walking along the Vistula, they bought souvenirs and laughed and roved about in the carefree way teenagers do.

Her eyes went over everything like it would be the first and last time. They clung to the sight of every last petal before they fell to the ground.

He lifted her up so she could kiss every one, then he pulled her to him, and kissed her, too. He placed her back on the ground, turned, broke a spring of the cherry blossoms off the tree for her, carefully so as not to let any petals fall off, and handed it to her.

She tried to put it behind her ear, but it would not stay, so she gently pushed the branch into her bun like a hair pin.

She wondered aloud, ‘Do you think they decide the fate of lovers? Like God made them, one for every time a person falls in love? Like for each petal he picks off the tree in spring, does he say,

“They love each other. They love each other not.”?

‘And when the last petal falls off a tree and it says,

“I love you.”

‘Does it mean God make that other person also fall in love?’

She paused for a second, threw her head back, looked to the small patch of blue-blackish sky, where only the strongest of the Milky Way’s stars could peek through the canopy of trees, and mused,

‘At the the end of the cherry blossom season, when the last petal falls off the last tree does it decide whether or not two people will get marry? Or do you think it announces when two great lovers will be born or not?’

She looked back at him, ‘Do you think he just keeps on making lovers that way forever?’

As they walked through the shops that night and the petals fell away, he would stop and pretend to look at some trinket. His heart beating, ‘She loves me.’

And then another would fall and his heart would pluck painfully, ‘She loves me not.’

With every footfall that felled those soft petals from her hair, he was filled with trepidation and anxiety. Their love was flying away on the wind. It was fleeting with the spring. They wished they could be together a little longer, at least until their full hearts burst into summer fireworks.

He trailed behind her, and then dejectedly thought, ‘The branches swaying in the wind may be saying she loves me, but that small bit I broke off says she doesn’t.’

Somewhere along those shops on the Vistula, the last petal fell. And while she was giggling, the dark-eyed, blond boy kissed her anyway.

Her face turned a shade of pink that glowed like the ethereal light those petals gave off as they returned every moonbeam to the lovers in the sky. Her orchid of a face bloomed with its Queen of the Night glow, and blushing all over, she smiled at him with the brightest and toothiest grin. He kissed her again. He and she roamed, skipped, and laughed about until it was high moon.

‘Maybe all our love is only temporary and as evanescent as the spring wind.’

When they got home that night, or rather, the next morning, they were filled with the excitement of a party winding down. Their hushed laughter and ‘Shh, shh.’ between tripping and drunkenly stepping out of their shoes at the door, they were already half-sleepwalking to their rooms. Like a child, she tried to fight the call to the land of sleep. She did not want to miss these last moments in Warsaw.

At the door of her temporary bedroom that night, he kissed her one last time. And later in the foggy morning, still groggy and falling asleep in the backseat, they drove her to the airport.

He watched her go through the security gate and at the last, she spun around and drew her smile like a bow to blow a kiss that landed in his breast like Cupid’s arrow. His breath caught in his chest. She bounced off to a place he could not see, as carefree as she could be holding that sad freedom in her heart.

She rubbed her face with her sleeve. Their cocoon had split open and then there were no tears, just dew on their wings.

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The account of their love story now at a close, they were again seated at a table in the Meatpacking District with their friend.

They stared at one another for a moment. They really had loved one another and he was sorry. He had always thought it would have been different if they had dated when they were a little older.

Just, ‘Do you think we would have worked out if we had been a little older?’

Yes, this is the one she would have married if their lives had been different, but their path the same. She was certain of it now.

‘I do.’

‘Do you think the trees said, “I love you?”’

‘I do.’

She swirled the straw in her mimosa around, mulled over this meeting with her ex, and said, ‘But there are things we let go and though they return, they aren't meant to be.’