When You Got Off the Wrong Train
I arrived with suitcases not understanding what you said, begging without words for you to say stay. I brought the plane ticket, the cowardice, and the illusion that a kiss would be enough to pay rent. It wasn’t. But I also brought those nights where we’d put on a random playlist while you drank wine, and the world stopped existing. Those moments where money didn’t matter, nor language, nor anything beyond that bubble we built between songs.
They sold us that love conquers all. Lie. Money conquers all. My credit card didn’t cover living expenses, and without work it’s hard to survive in a place where you barely understand what people tell you. You chose your economic stability disguised as emotional. I chose not to insist because I had no way to stay, though every night with that playlist made me believe I could. Between cigars and a sea without tourists, between those songs playing while the wine ran out, we could have been something. But “could have” is the cowardest word in language.
People say it only happens a couple times in life. That connection where everything makes sense without words. That moment where a playlist and a bottle of wine are enough to build a universe. Two options: get off the train or stay seated watching through the window. We stayed seated. Not from lack of love—because there was love in every song we listened to, in every shared glass—but from excess of fear. Fear it would work and we’d lose everything. Fear those perfect nights wouldn’t be enough to sustain the real days where you have to pay bills and understand languages and build a life.
Several years passed. Now there are birthday calls, tweets reconnecting what didn’t dare truly begin. Maybe they’ll be the only calls we give each other all year for the rest of our lives, until one no longer answers. And I wonder if we really knew each other or invented ourselves in those wine-and-music nights where the rest of the world faded. Because what I do know is those moments were real. That perfect almost where everything fit was real. And that’s why it hurts more: because we knew we had something and chose to let it go anyway.
The truth is more brutal than any destiny: we chose wrong. Not because we didn’t have perfect moments—we did, every night with that playlist was one—but because we decided perfect moments weren’t enough against the reality of rent and work and bank accounts. We pretended it was bad timing, circumstances, that there was no way. When really it was fear and money against wine and songs. And the first won. Two cowards who preferred dying safe to living in that beautiful uncertainty of nights where only we mattered. This was our life. And we let it pass by choosing to pay bills instead of playing another song.
