magnum opus. the epilogue.

The marriage to Peter Pan was no fairy tale.

And as I danced with him at our wedding to the same haunting song that had not long ago opened up a new world of possiblility that night on the hardwood floors of my paramour's asylum, I felt like a prisoner.

Everything that had once been, inevitably, resumed before the ink on the marriage license had even had time to dry. The once wistful and starry-eyed girl became an iconoclastic barbarian, deconstructing and devouring each relationship that crossed her threshold. However, as the years passed, I grudgingly lowered my mallet, and succumbed to marriage once more.

The neighborhood in which we bought our house was every bit of the cookie-cutter image I had laid out in my youth. Tightly nestled houses flanked the street, fences and garages in tow, and a slate-gray sidewalk meandering through this small splinter of heaven.

On a blustery afternoon mid-year, I attended a conference for work being held at a local convention center. As we all lined up to receive our badges and seating arrangements, I glanced out the window at the other drones filing in. I was alone, and I was hoping to find someone I knew to pass the time with.

Beyond the tinted glass and the ornamental shrubbery, above the masses of people, I recognized a figure. Almost as if with a spotlight turned to illuminate the masterpiece of the gallery, there was my David; my sculpture of what I thought should be good and true in a man loomed only a short distance away through a thin sliver of glass.

I fought hard with my heart. Keep pumping, please, for the love of God, I pleaded. It had been six years since Matt and I has spoken the goodbyes that we both presumed to be our last. I hadn’t once imagined our eyes would rest on the other's face again, and my vicious heart was clearly protesting.

When I entered the conference room, I sat down for a moment to try to get my wits about me. What if he doesn’t recognize me? Should I speak to him? What if he screams at me and tells me to ‘get away you wretched fool of a woman’?

He was in the refreshments line. He looked just as I remembered. Tall, slender. His head still shaven, glasses still framing the eyes that had once thrown countless longing and seemingly unfeigned glances over the arches and plains of my body. I knew well the chest that rested underneath the blue button-down shirt. My hands had walked and memorized its lines once, as if they had some intuition that their journey might be short and unsustainable.

If I was going to talk to him, this is when it would have to be. There was assigned seating, and some might consider it in bad taste to catch up with your former visionary-dream of a lover during a seminar speech. I gathered up every bit of courage I could muster from down deep in the bowels of the microscopic cells that composed my body, walked up to him, and as if out of habit or longing, softy brushed his elbow.

“Hey there. I just thought I’d be the one to come over and say hello,” I stammered with a slight chuckle.

He looked trapped. “Oh. Wow. Hey. H-how are you doing?”
“I’ve been okay. What about you? Still at the old office?”
“I’m good. Yeah, I’m still there. And you?” he asked, still sounding stunned.
“I’m over at the branch on Marianne Avenue now. I’ve been there for about five years.”
“No way,” he said, looking away. I had always loved the way he glanced off in the distance when he was nervous. “I just applied for a transfer there.”

Somewhere, I imagined a cloven-footed imp checking off a list of infernal plots hand-crafted just for me.

“Uh-uh,” was all I could manage.
“Yeah. How do you like it over there?” he questioned.

I think I said something about the office manager being a bit of a knuckle head (and I’m sure I used that ridiculous word) but how generally speaking the place was really exceptional—I can’t really be sure, because at that point I was running on pure cracked-out adrenaline force like a jet coasting in with no engines. I didn’t know what else to say.

Inside, I was sceaming. I was wrong! God, was I wrong! You were perfect to me...you still are. Take me away like you did before. Please, I swear I won't be an idiot again...

But instead, conquered by rational thought, I chose to say another goodbye.

“Well, it was good to see you,” I said.
“You, too,” he finished. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

The only way this was possible was for him to indeed get transferred to my office, but after six years, I think we both knew this wasn’t the place to consider the repercussions that event might have.

Flushed, feeling a bit faint and completely exhausted, I sullied my way back to my table and took my seat. As if Moses himself had been present in this very room, the sea of faces between where I sat and where he was soon parted, creating a clear line of vision between our respective positions.

In the course of the blessedly lengthy speech, I did not refrain from more than a few stolen glances. And, each time I looked in that direction, Matt's face was directed at mine. I thought surely this was coincidental, but I wasn’t taking this situation lightly. I had to, I needed to talk to him again. Before the speech ended, I devised another excuse for conversation.

He was alone at his table when the keynote speaker finished his closing remarks, and people again began to descend on the refreshments table. Trying awkwardly to seem casual, I walked up to where he was sitting.

“So, I was just thinking that if you want me to, I could put in a good word for you with the office manager,” I said, revealing my clever conversation starter.
“Sure. That’d be great. I just don’t know how things are going to play out at the office and I’ve heard the Marianne branch is great…”
“Yeah, it really is,” I interrupted, accidentally sounding a little too eager.

Maybe he noticed, so he changed the topic of conversation.

“So where are you living now?”
“Brookline,”
“Really, I live in Brookline, too,” he said, seeming amused at the coincidence. “Which neighborhood?”
“Autumn Park,” I replied.
“No way.”
“Yeah, why?”
“I live in Autumn Park.”

What had turned out to be an already eventful evening, suddenly morphed into something of a cross between winning the lottery and the apocalypse.

All I could say was, “That’s funny."
“Which part do you live in? I mean, which street?”
“I live off of Ackers Avenue.”
“Mmm…” he truly seemed perplexed. “I’m off of Ackers and Loveland.”
“That’s like six houses down from me,” I stammered.
“I know. That's wild.”

Just then, a vanilla-looking woman, slightly shorter than me who I noticed had been sitting next to Matt during the speech, came back and took her seat at the table.

“Oh, Valencia, this is my wife, Megan. Megan, this is Valencia. She was an intern at the office a while back.”

I was waiting for the film crew to come out and let me know which painfully intrusive reality TV show I was being punked by, and where the hell was the money I deserved for being placed in this festering boil of a situation.

Stunned, but fast on my feet, I quickly recovered and reached my hand out to hers, while I offered a pleasant, “Nice to meet you.”
“You, too,” she offered back politely.

I can tell you this much—if I had seen my husband conversing with someone like me when I wasn’t around, the gloves would be off and the claws would’ve come out. However, she continued by courteously asking where I was working now.

“She’s actually over at Marianne Avenue,” Matt answered for me. “She’s gonna put in a good word for me over there.”
“Well, that’s great,” she said.

Instantly, I could tell Megan was an extremely congenial and pleasant woman. While not exactly the replica of the inconceivable beauty I would’ve selected for Matt, she seemed to fit the personality profile in a sickly-sweet, agreeable sort of way.

My domain was conquered.

“Well. It was good seeing you, Matt. Megan, it was nice to meet you. I’ll be sure to let the manager know you’re up for that transfer,” I said, suddenly humbled.

“Thanks. I’d really appreciate it,” he said, waving goodbye as I turned to make my way to the door.

On my way home, I stopped and buried myself in the dark corner of a coffee shop to recompose and gather my meandering thoughts. As I allowed the steaming cup to scald my weakened hands, questions burned and tugged on my muddled mind: Why does this matter to me now? Am I still just eternally grateful for the handful of weeks we spent together? Am I once again feeling the life well up inside of me—was it all just a fantasy that I felt and saw the picture of everything I’d imagined as a girl in all of its Norman Rockwell perfection? I just didn’t know. I still don’t know.

I sulked for the better part of an hour, languishing there, feeling my heart roaring and tearing at my rib cage like a crazed, caged animal starving and struggling for a piece of flesh just outside of its reach. Then, the grim reality of life set in. There could be no fulfillment of that hunger. Mistakes and newly imposed boundaries would leave the beast inside thrashing and hungry. Once made, decisions change the course of the reality in which we live, and the distance of road we had once traveled together had been irrevocably forked.

After about an hour, I made my way home. I turned down the streets that had now become familiar in my scripted life, but on which I was still a wandering gypsy. Except this time, I noticed a house on the corner that had once blended in, just a few rows down, where a pickup truck—the same pickup truck I had ridden in dozens of times—sat parked in the driveway. A fence encased the backyard; the house was blue with black shutters, and a beautifully manicured lawn boasted itself out in front. It wasn't all that different from my own home.

Then I realized why it had been so easy to overlook this object of my longest imaginings—it was the same portrait harbored in the deepest corners of my mind, the one I had envisioned countless times, with one exception. I was not able to recognize it because, as the fates would have it, the divine artist—the one who meticulously and purposefully crafts such masterpieces of the mind and of existence—seemed to have decided on a more suitable female subject for his magnum opus.