Romance In A Column

chapter fourteen,

If Eric Lee ever taught anything to Wren Allen, it's that one's relationships are either a scale model of their past or a perfect blueprint of one's future.

It's unintentional, accidental and, like anything describable through those words, condemning.

In the matter of the past, it's all about unhealed wounds. Skin slitted—either deliberately inflicted incisions or caused by the jagged edges of broken glass—and gone untreated. Leaving poorly healed scars after one tried to amend with self-performed stitches or left time consume the stray bits and draw itself together.

People go back where one's skin was first painted and try to mimic the color palette of stromous eyes whose dull clouds hang near the heart, softening the edges of repressed feelings with the tab one's finger; letting the grey stains of graphite take home once again under fingernails.

A destructive way to fix the unbroken present as one should've done the shattered past.

Whereas the future is all about what late nights—with warm lighting of street-lap piercing through the thin material of curtains and an empty side of a cold bed—would have one believe is their ideal tomorrow.

It's subjective, as all under the sun is. To some, it's beige walls with small—dripping with color—hand smears throughout its length. Conversation which carries on without one, where anecdotes of several versions of the same day are shared, as they lay back and exchange conspiratory glances with the embodiment of their dreams across the table.

To others it's an incandescent beam of darkness, speckled with multicolored reflectors on a dance floor. Knowing the warm body pasted to yours will fill the yawning emptiness of their sheets at night. They'll be the temporary fulfillment of an inexplicable something that once you told yourself money could buy—yet beyond the luxurious cars and toys like watches and yachts, it's been unable to.

They are two opposite sides of the spectrum, and in between these, there are grey colors where Wren Allen hides.

Quite possibly, there is information and studies—research on the field of psychology which had, at one point or another, been hinted at or handed out during one of the hours long lectures Eric and Wren endured throughout their college career—to corroborate this claim.

But truth be told, Wren had never considered the implications of these words. Merely pegged them as one of his pre-med friend's drunk musings and the clarity the bottom of rum bottles seem to give Eric Lee.

Wren's poison when it comes to love has alway been the latter part of his friend's theory. His type had alway been women who aligned with himself and the version of Wren his twelve year old self had pictured and idealized.

Though he doesn't critique it, he's never been one to picture a life in a pale, two-story townhouse with a mown lawn and a bed of gardenias by the porch. Wren never pictured himself waking up to the sunrise and the quiet air of small towns. The scent and coolness of rain clogging the master bedroom where he shares with a body his hands had run across it's dips and creases millions of times, in the far opposite of the end of the mattress.

He likes the city lifestyle in it's rapid pace of today and the exuberance of it's tomorrow. The sound of the unpausable existence of thousands of people accompanying him every moment of his hectic workday. Wren is fueled by the anonymity, ephemerality and addicting immortality of the New York City streets.

And consequently, he's learned to love it's women. He's fallen for the red lips hiding cutting smiles, the shimmery dresses which alway seem to catch the lights of the reflectors while they dance and their elation when all eyes skid to them. The type of women who'd want you for sometime. Who'd warm you for tonight. Whose lives are better off without you, hence their early departure—usually, before dawn kisses the horizon.