Marcus keeps dragging himself back to that shithole coffee shop on Elm Street, even though he knows damn well she’s never walking through that door again. It’s pathetic, really. The kind of pathetic that makes you want to punch yourself in the face. But here he is, every goddamn Tuesday at 3 PM, ordering the same vanilla latte with extra foam and parking his sorry ass at their old table by the grease-stained window.
The barista, some kid with facial piercings and dead eyes, probably thinks he’s lost his mind. Hell, maybe he has.
Sarah used to sit across from him in that cracked vinyl chair, her dark hair hanging like curtains around a face that was too good for this dump. Always playing with that one strand, twisting it around her finger when her brain was churning. And Christ, was her brain always churning. About the smog-choked sky, about whether the rats in the alley had souls, about them. Especially about them, when everything started going to hell.
“You think we’re actually meant for this shit?” she’d asked him once, stirring her chai tea like she was casting a spell. The question cut through the stale air like a blade.
He’d laughed it off like the coward he was. “What the hell kind of question is that?” Reached across that sticky table to grab her hand. “Course we are.”
But he saw it in her eyes that day, something dark and resigned that he didn’t want to face. Marcus had always been good at not facing things. Professional-level avoidance.
Love’s a lie, he knows that now. People talk about it like it’s some monument, something carved in stone. But it’s not. It’s more like smoke…there one second, gone the next if you’re not paying attention. And Marcus? He wasn’t paying attention to shit.
He took her for granted like she was part of the goddamn furniture. When she’d talk about her dead-end job at the library, he’d scroll through his phone like a zombie. When she wanted to check out some pretentious art exhibit downtown, he’d grunt about being busy with work. When she’d wake up screaming from nightmares, shaking like a leaf, he’d just tell her dreams were bullshit and roll over.
What a fucking waste of space he was.
The last time they sat in this dump together was a Thursday in March, rain hammering the windows like bullets. They were playing that depressing song by The National, “I need my girl”, and Sarah was quiet as a grave. She kept staring out at the rain like she was watching her life drain away, while Marcus checked emails like the world would end if he missed one.
“We need to talk,” she said finally.
Four words. Four words that might as well have been a death sentence. He looked up from his phone, really saw her for the first time in weeks. Her eyes were raw, bloodshot. Dark circles underneath like bruises.
“Talk about what?” he asked, even though his gut already knew the answer.
“About this.” She gestured between them with a hand that shook slightly. “About how we’re both just going through the motions.”
He wanted to fight it. Wanted to tell her she was wrong, that they could fix this trainwreck. But the words died in his throat like everything else good in his life. Because she wasn’t wrong. They were done. Had been done for months.
“Someone else?” The words tasted like ash.
She shook her head. “No. Just… we’re not the same people anymore. Hell, maybe we never were the right people for each other.”
That’s when he broke down. Right there in front of everyone, blubbering like a kid who’d lost his favorite toy. Sarah reached across and took his hand, and somehow that made it worse. Her showing him kindness when he was losing everything.
“I’m sorry,” he kept saying, the words falling out like blood from a wound. “I can change. I can be different.”
But she just kept shaking her head. “It’s not about changing. We’re just… incompatible now. And nobody’s to blame for that.”
They sat there for another hour, watching the rain turn the street into a river. Most honest they’d been in months. Funny how you finally learn to communicate when there’s nothing left to save.
She kissed him goodbye outside, tasting like chai and finality. Then she walked away through the rain, and he watched until she disappeared into the gray. Never saw her again.
Six months now. Six months of haunting this place like some pathetic ghost, hoping she might change her mind and materialize at that table. But Sarah doesn’t change her mind about the big stuff. It’s one of the things that made him love her, back when he still had the right to love her.
The vanilla latte tastes like shit now. Too sweet, too fake. Or maybe that’s just him. Everything tastes wrong when you’re hollow inside.
He’s trying to be less of a bastard these days. Not for her.
That ship sailed and sank.
But because maybe he owes it to the world to be less of a walking disaster. He listens when people talk. Keeps his phone in his pocket. Goes to those art exhibits alone and tries to see what Sarah might have seen in all that pretentious garbage.
But he still comes here on Tuesdays. Can’t seem to stop himself. Not because he thinks she’ll come back, he’s not that delusional, but because this is where he learned that love isn’t some permanent fixture. It’s fragile as glass, and if you don’t handle it right, it’ll cut you to pieces.
He’s still figuring out how not to break everything he touches. Turns out it’s harder than it looks.
The barista’s giving him that look again, the one that says “creepy regular alert.” Marcus should probably find a new place to drink overpriced coffee and wallow in his mistakes. But not today. Today he’ll sit here a little longer, remembering how Sarah used to twist her hair when she was thinking, and maybe learning how to be the kind of man who deserves something good.
Maybe that’s all he can do.