The Untitled Encounter

                Every encounter held within it a small mystery, only visible to the gifted ones. Every encounter came attached to it a meaning, doesn’t matter how big or small, important or not, significant or less significant…

                “Excuse me, sir,”

                It was a woman, one with pitch black hair and two bottomless holes as her eyes. Set against her flawless, white skin, she was such an ethereal beauty. Her translucent lips, just a little bit colored compared to her skin, formed an almost perfect slid just beneath her nose. She was such a magnificent sight to behold, a beauty as bright as the sun yet as mysterious as the moon. But he realized that she was something he shouldn’t be taken by. He placed down his newspaper, with a perfect thud on the table, a smile, a knowing smile blossoming on his lips. The woman smiled back at him, and a brief moment passed with not a single word spoken between them.

                “If I may…”

                “Yes, please,” he said, before the woman could even finish her sentence. He smiled when she looked at him, somewhat bewildered, and again, a brief moment of silence ensued and before long, she thanked him and sat on the chair next to him. He lifted a cup of tea from someplace else on the table and placed it in front of her, a small smile urging her to drink the cup of golden liquid ensued. The woman, again surprised, shook her head as she kept her eyes straight, staring deep into his.

                “You seemed to…know me,” she noted, her fingers tightly curled around the front of her lace skirt, her face now projecting regret. The man, whose features of himself was as peculiar as hers, who very much made him stood out from the crowd, merely smiled.

                “Alas, I also know that you…”

                “What is your purpose here, sir?”

                “Your jasmine tea will cool off if you do not drink it now,”

                “Have you been watching me?”

                “Drink, milady, the tea.”

                She laughed. It was a small laugh, somewhat unsure, someone spontaneous, somewhat untrue. She picked up the cup and sipped the tea, put it down again and her eyes bore down, so deep, very deep into the man’s eyes, asking, wanting, hungry for explanation. “I’ve done what you asked of me. Now, tell me…”

                “Your lover will never come to see you,” blurted the man, his face still smiling yet no emotion followed since. The woman’s face snapped into attention, her eyes wide, intense emotion flaring up in her once very cool, calm eyes. Again, they exchanged glances, and no words followed and the man still smiled the way he always did it, the way she always saw him, his face, his emotion. It was obvious she tried to take control of the situation, but this man wasn’t like any of those she had spoken to over the long years she had lingered around.

                All the long years she’d spend looking for her beloved…

                And today, here, a man came to tell her that he will never come.

                The woman sighed. It was a deep sigh, within it contained a sense of frustration, a dash of realization, a tinge of regret.

                “And you knew it, from the very beginning,” he paused, “That he will never get to come to see you, despite his promises…”

                He noticed. The curl of fingers on her skirt tightened, and her lips frowned. The man realized that he had hit the target.

                “You should let it go,” he noted, “and begin walking the path you are expected to, toward the place that you belong to.”

                Tears began to garner at the corner of her eyes, and she began to look away.

                “Who are you, sir that you seemed to know me?”

                He smiled, and her face lightened up. Of course, who wouldn’t feel delighted, that for once he was smiling genuinely, and that the smile she saw now blossoming on his lips weren’t the same to the ones he had always worn. It lightens up his unusually formal features. She realized that with eyes the color of the clearest and most luscious forests couldn’t have been a natural trait for one that of a local. She smiled to herself. Why couldn’t she realize it sooner, that this man does not belong here? Why couldn’t she realize it earlier, upon contact, that this man shouldn’t have been here…?

                “A hundred years had passed,” he pointed quietly. She tightened the grasp of her fingers and patted the tears that were spilling, bit by bit, at the corners of her eyes.

                “As for you,”

                “We are in two definitely different worlds,” he noted as he sipped his tea. She recognized those moves. A gentlemanly move dating a hundred years back, when the barons and the baroness, the earls and the dukes were still celebrated on the land across the ocean, further to the west, a little to the north. In an ironic way, it mimics and mirror the moves she had always known, had always seen, always remembered, always loved.

                “Alive, well, young, and preceding me, with warm blood and flesh,”

                “A curse, for one who betrayed, trespassed and trodden a forbidden boundary unknown to most mortals.”

                “A gift, to ignorant souls begging for the world’s regret,” she noted, tears drying as she smiled. “Gabriel. I know you now…”

                “Lady Estelle,” he said, as he took her hand and kissed the back of her palm, “it is time for you to be released,” he paused, as he took a piece of yellowed, aged piece of letter bearing a 1809 stamp on it, March 21st and placed it into her hand. The lady, Estelle as she was called, took the piece of letter, placed it to her chest, and the clear pearls of tears again visited her eyes. She needn’t read it to understand it. She had always known. She had always felt it, but she still needed to see it. It was her life-long regret, the one that had kept her on the surface of this plain, between the mortal and afterworld. A hundred years…

                But now with it in her hand, she had lost all her reason, her regret to be kept here, wondering between plains, between worlds. She held up her gaze and smiled, as the man, the one with amazing eyes the color of the greenest emerald, the most fertile forest smiled, not just with his lips but with his eyes, too.

                “I would’ve never known it will be you, Gabriel, who will release me from this regret,” she said, a sincere, sweetest, most beautiful smile blossoming on her lips. She began to fade, as if a morning mist, with sunlight falling on her, claiming her into the sky. Again, she sighed, this time full of joy, and she said, “I will now be on my way to see my beloved Luke, and together, we will watch you from afar, we will protect you,” another fulfilling smile, “Goodbye Gabriel. I thank you, from the bottom of my heart…”

                The man, Gabriel, as he was called, his smile, his good expression died as Estelle’s voice floats away, disappearing with the wind together with her ethereal presence. He lowered his face and he sighed once, twice, thrice, and before he knew it, pearls of clear crystal dropped from his eyes. He was surprised. Had he loved her that much? Perhaps he did. It rips him so when she fell for his best friend, Luke, only to have Luke returning her love as well. They were happy. But they were military men, him, a colonel, Luke, his lieutenant. When Luke died in a war, he gave him a letter, a final testimonial to how much he’d loved her. He asked that he give it to her as soon as possible should he met his demise, so she could forget him and move on. In the end he betrayed his friend, thinking if he did so he’d be able to have her to himself. But even until the time Death came claiming her earthly soul, he had never been able to confess to her. In the a hundred years since her demise, Estelle kept returning to the café by the little forest to wait for Luke’s return, and he had always watched her, as a man damned with an undying body. Only, after a hundred years, did he find the courage to approach her, to tell her the truth, to see her fly off to the place she truly belongs.

                For once, he stared at his hand. These hands, he thought, and he sighed. He patted his eyes, opened his wallet, dropped some notes onto the table and left. The man with the amazing emerald eyes were never to be seen again, never to drop by.

                As told, an encounter, what may be casual to others, may meant a hundred years worth of emotion, feeling, secret and regret kept. Those we see, those we touch, those we spoke to in daily basis, familiar or just a brisk contact, within it contains a meaning of its own thus never, ever take for granted…

*Author’s note: Just a short piece with little aim, little base, little fact, completely following a lyrical imagination with no start or a definite end and hadn’t even been proof-read by anyone, with no checking whatsoever. So please don’t shoot me and I dearly hope any of you, even if only one, enjoy it. Thx for reading it m(u_u)m*