Interrupted love song

Conclusion

When did things begin to change? For the first few months, they’d been deliriously happy. For the Christmas holidays, Marissa had taken him home to meet her family, who, despite their money, were admirably down-to-earth and grounded. By the time the new semester had begun, however, things between them had suddenly begun to cool. He broke dates with her without a second thought. He made promises he was unable to keep. Naively he had imagined the love he had for Marissa was enough to sustain them through any rough patch they encountered. Young love, he had so cavalierly failed to realise, was as a fragile new flower in bloom, in need of care and attention.

In the meantime, though, he had important exams to cram for. Marissa, he was relieved to notice, had begun to complain less about their not “spending quality time together”. She’d begun to make friends, transforming herself to become a social creature he did not know. From the sidelines he admired her. It was almost like watching a caterpillar undergo the metamorphosis to become a butterfly. Before his eyes he saw the change. And he was glad. Suddenly she’d stopped being the cool, enigmatic loner that everybody’d been in awe of at the beginning of the school year. She became wildly popular. Hurrying to a lecture he would glimpse her at a distance, walking with a group of people to the library. Or she would be liming, chatting and laughing with friends under the arts faculty trees between classes.

In retrospect Daniel could admit to feeling slightly uncomfortable with the new Marissa. Had he been able to, he would have confessed to being jealous of the friends with whom she had begun spending so much of her time, and the campus socials she attended, without him, on the weekends. But how could he have done that when he was the reason she’d begun to drift in the first place?

But maybe the jealousy was only part of something bigger he was feeling, some presage he was at the time unable to name, which caused his stomach to clench and his teeth to be set on edge whenever he thought about the changes he was witnessing in her. Was that nameless fear the reason he had gone to that Chancellor Hall fete that fateful Friday night when he should have been studying with his study group?

Daniel had arrived late. The party was in full flight, with gyrating bodies on the dance floor. Over the din of the calypso music blasting from speaker boxes, he’d seen one of Marissa’s friends, Shelly Morrison, and had enquired where she was.

He registered the brief flash of shock in Shelly’s eyes before, composing herself, she replied breezily, “Oh, I don’t know. I think she might have gone home already.”

But, even as he turned and left, Daniel knew the girl was lying; it wasn’t even midnight. Marissa would not have left the party already.

It did not take long to find her.

The night was humid and dark; there was a mere biscuit of a moon hanging in the sky. He was sweating through the fine fabric of his shirt. The noise of the music had receded and he could hear the increased tempo of his heart beats as, acting on some mysterious instinct, he approached the hall.

Marissa was in a darkened corner outside, beneath a tree, two figures kissing. In the pale ribbon of moonlight he saw that it was unmistakably, undeniably her. Marissa in a compromising, sexual embrace.

***

Daniel’s rain-soaked rubber-soled slippers made a squelching noise on the cold floor tiles as he hurried from aisle to aisle, the image of her that night, twenty years ago, kissing that guy, whom he later discovered was someone she’d previously introduced to him as a ‘friend’, superimposed on the forefront of his mind.

Outside, the rain was pouring down.

“Marissa!” he called now, uncaring that people, including the pudgy Syrian woman he’d noticed earlier, were looking at him curiously. The sight of a man in the throes of an emotional and mental breakdown would obviously be a strange, but welcome, disruption of their normal Saturday morning routine.

He was running now, his flip-flops slapping the tiles hard. “Marissa!”

“Daniel?” She appeared from the cereal aisle, frowning.

Daniel’s steps slowed. He shivered with cold. And something else. He’d never spoken to her again after that night, he suddenly realised. She’d tried for weeks to apologise, explain, but he’d cut her off.

From the PA system Luther Vandross crooned, “.Love will be better, better than ever, the second time around.”

A little crowd had begun to gather about them.

“I made a mistake,” she said when he neared her. “I’m sorry.” Tears were in her eyes.

“Me too,” he said, stopping. “It’s always been you, you know, right?”

“So. too late?” he asked, nodding at her left hand.

“I got divorced this past summer.” She held up her finger and shrugged. “I’ve been trying to find a reason to take it off.” Then she looked back at him and smiled slowly, like sun breaking through the dawn.

And Daniel’s heart swelled when she said, “Now, maybe I do.”

THE END.