The wedding day
She was waiting for him outside, on her wedding day.
She had figured him coming on his old bike he passionately restored, dressed in his best suit, a black double-breasted suit quilted with white yarn on the borders, wheeling on the cobblestones to the hall, through the square, in the sun, smiling heartily maybe for the second or third time in his life, a bouquet of white rose in his hand laying on the handlebar.
He had sharp, remissive black eyes, he had enchanted her with loquacious and learned speeches, he was damn brilliant in everything he did. He said he saw himself in his old age sitting outside a desert pub, in the sun, writing poems, reading great past writers, while his children were growing up around the world. He said he wanted to learn to repair his life like repairing a motorcycle.He had always felt an outsider, he didn’t feel welcome anywhere. Then he met her one day.
She never knew his real age, ’cause he didn’t feel so old as he was, so why giving importance to numbers? She sat on the sofa, listening to him inventing stories of a shy froggy boy meeting an awfully beautiful and simple girl, she sat for hours on the sofa, listening to his infinite silences. And tried to dismantle the wall he had built in years around his heart.
They couldn’t understand each other, their worlds too distant, they couldn’t give up each other.
She was there, waiting for him, remebering when they just met and he gave her the first present she received from anyone on her 26th birthday, kissing her; when he let her waiting for him all night long without a call, and how much she had cried him to be a stupid, while he simply replied he needed to be alone roaming through the town, that night. She remembered the night they watched a movie on that sofa, he healing her back with an aftersun cream, and kissing her shoulders; when they broke up, ’cause she couldn’t proof him scientifically why he should have been more in contact with her. That day she went out his house gate praying for him to stop her car, while she looked at his silhouette getting smaller and smaller from the rear-view mirror.
She was waiting for him outside, on her wedding day. Outside the cemetary, after his funeral. She never knew if he had been buried with his black suit quilted with white yarn, but she wanted to suppose so.
He didn’t stop her car, that day, the day they broke up. He tried then to rebuild their relationship, but was not ready to change his mind.And died in a car accident some months after.
She found out they loved the same song, seated on the church steps, too late to listen to it together.