Death by Kleenex
This entry dedicated to MzMin, in her quest for a RM15K wedding package. Also, I'm bored at work.
A cup of coffee. A foggy window-pane. And thou.
It doesn’t get any more clichéd than this, does it?
What’s missing would be the booths with the cracked vinyl chairs, the street-wise waitress with the heart of gold, the Wall Street-Madison Square types scurrying away from the rain into the sauna-like subway stations.
What’s missing is your hand clasping mine, as you look earnestly into my eyes, me in a cosy-yet-fashionable sweater and you in a black turtleneck and geek-chic glasses.
Except this isn’t New York.
Except this isn’t a Nora Ephron movie.
And I’m trying to exorcise the parts of you that are here, sodden tissue by crumpled sodden tissue.
One 2-ply Kleenex for your charmingly crooked teeth, the kinks in your hair, the little white scar that breaks your right eyebrow in two.
Another for that distinct smell that I thought only I could detect- cigarettes and Aramis and that other thing- let’s call it pheromones.
Yet another angry swipe at one reddened eye for all those times, the times when we spoke without voices, the times when we laughed at jokes other people never could and never would understand, the times that made me think – this could be it. You could be it.
Don’t worry, I’m saving a whole box for that last spiel you made- the infamous ‘It’s Not You It’s Me’ speech. No no, not because I was duped, not because you sounded so goddamned convincing, so earnest, that I truly believed that It Really Was You, Not Me.
The whole box is for the fact that you couldn’t respect me enough to be creative- you just had to revert to a stock-in-trade, another bloody cliché.
And I just had to do this in a Starbucks. In KLCC.
Where’s Yusuf Haslam when you need him?
nads went at 15:53