Yellow Tulip (Please Look Twice)

Yellow Tulip (Please Look Twice)

Sally sat in Rosie’s Café, staring out of the window.

Her tea was cold, but if she noticed, she didn’t care.

Beep.

Her mobile buzzed: One new text.

Hey, do you have the final draft ready? I need it ASAP.

Cheers,
Aaron

And for a single, fatal moment, her mind drifted.

She saw him every day, in some form or another. As he walked past, her eyes were trained to his, and he was the only one in the crowd who mattered, no matter who else was there.

She knew him, so well, she had listened to every word he had ever said to her, every look was burned indelibly into her mind.

She needed him to see her. She did all she could think of: she stood in front of a crowd and risked everything for him to notice her.

She changed her hair, her clothes, her manners. She did everything she could to be the girl he wanted. But she still seemed as noticeable to him as wallpaper.

No-one could see, to look at her. Her face was blank, her eyes open to the world around her. No one could see that her senses were attentive to nothing but his every move, while her mind tried to rationalize this new presence in her consciousness.

She wanted him to see it too, but couldn’t say a word. A world was stretched between them, a world of his ignorance or indifference to her thoughts and her feelings.

She’s spent years just waiting for him to notice. A hundred times she thought that he had finally realized, and a hundred times she was proven wrong.

She knew that it would never go away. It was a shallow depth, a longing for the man in her head, not the man beside her. The perfect being who would see her for who she was, and give up everything to be with her.

And she knew it was stupid, and crazy, and self-destructive.

So she convinced herself to lock him out. Her heart and mind left, they dreamt about other faces as his sat, in profile, half a metre away.

She did this a thousand times. Every time, every lousy time, he found the key back in, without realizing he’d done it.

And he’d never look at her twice.

Her fingers skimmed over the keys of her phone, the words flowing as she wrote back:

I’m at Rosie’s Cafe. Meet me?

Sally

Her hand hovered over the ‘send key’. She sighed, and added one last line to her message:

xxx