Let me look at you. Just one moment longer.

Wouldn’t you like it if you could finally just got over your bickering and your anger and your sarcastic comments and just sat down together? There was once a time when you could do it so easily, without a second thought. That was your favorite thing to do together. Now you’ve spent months prolonging it and hoping to find a way to avoid it a little longer.

You two sitting together in the same place, at the same time is avoided at all times and a constant fear of everyone that is around you. Maybe it’s because no one knows how either of you will react. Most probably it’s because both of you are still not sure how you would react if it did happen.

It would be nice though, to sit down as two people who once knew each other so much and figure out the mystery that is what happens after.

You play the scene in your head many times, with alternative endings depending on where you let the dialogue go. Some of them end in peace, a white flag finally raised from both sides, ready to surrender and disband your venom-armed troops. The others though end in more than just a clash, a thunderstorm of anger tangled between a typhoon of mixed feelings and poor judgment take over and trample on all the things you held dear in that relationship up until that point.

Eventually, there will come a moment where you will find the courage and try to have that conversation, in the full knowledge that it might be one of many or even just the last one.

Both of you will take your seats and throw the uncomfortable glances here and there and then you will begin to talk. You will talk about your friend’s new haircut, about the job you are trying to get, what you did on Christmas day and then the time will come where you start doing what you went there to do. Talk about the thoughts that haunted your heads, explain the fights, and admit the things that were left unsaid.

All of this truth will start rising to the surface and slowly compel your tongue to let one more sentence slip and then another. Until you temporarily run out of words and the gap leaves the other person the chance to jump and begin telling you their side of the story.

You will stare right at them and reminisce about the times where the face you had sitting opposite you was filled with innocence. Every word they spoke conquered your sense of hearing and became the only sound you could hear and you’ll want to pause for a moment.

Just for a little longer, you wish to stay right at that spot and look at that person and pretend that what you are hearing is not true.

That tiny moment where time freezes just for you would give you the chance to thoroughly inspect the house and find the one perfect object that you could throw at them. Just slam it right at that beautiful face and completely shut that pitiful well that is spurting out complete nonsense. If you had paused a minute before you would have wanted to cherish the calm you constructed with your truth. Now you’re stuck with the moment they bashed it against the wall and spat at it.

Let’s pause for a moment and count the slaps that the person deserves. One for thinking that you don’t know the truth. One for only being capable of lying, one for every time they looked at their phone, one for denying the things they did, and another for simply coming here.

Breathe in the still air of what’s in front of you and feel grateful that it finally came and shook you out of all the things you wanted to say, thinking that they would find understanding or even be heard by someone with the slightest common sense. You would take this borrowed moment and tip your head at the side, study all those features you used to know, and scoff at them. Mostly because they have all been showered by the things that disgust you and you prayed they were only rumors.

While they can’t see or hear you, you would laugh at their face and tell them what you know, how you found out, and even with everything you knew you still thought that you both owed each other a few more words. In a sense you were wrong, in another, you can laugh that the joke is no longer on you but it lies within them.

Let’s pause for a moment darling, let me look at you and miss you, tell you that I forgive you for everything and that a part of you will always feel like home. Let me steal a moment in time just for me, so I can think about how much I want to crush the glass on that sweet lying mouth of yours. Then when it’s time to go back to what’s real, I’ll nod and wait until you’re done with all the ridiculous words you came here to say.