Day 20

PROMPT: What was I thinking?

As soon as the words left my lips I was regretting them. My mouth felt dry. I was momentarily convinced that nothing had happened. That this had been another of my fantasy scenarios and I was just imagining the mortification this time. I just hadn’t thought it through in the past. It was just a very real daydream. But as I watched his face, I knew it was never how I would have imagined it.

No matter how many times I had told Roger in my head that I had feelings for him, I hadn’t prepared myself for this. There were times he had taken it well. There were times when I cried and we never spoke again. Every extreme on the dramatic spectrum had been accounted for in my rehearsals. But I always forgot not to overestimate the drama.

It had come about dramatically, of course. That is just who I am, I was now realizing. There was a limit to the number of times I could listen to him tell me stories about his day, smiling at himself for something he did that he thought had been stupid but had really just been normal. Like when he walked away from the coffee cart without his change. I had blurted out that I needed to talk to him about something, and the rest came naturally. How I felt. It had never been hard for me to be in touch with my feelings.

He listened patiently, staring at his mug as we sat at my kitchen table. I watched his face more intensely than I should have considering how much pressure he was probably feeling. It was amazing how quickly a few words could completely change your life. What was I thinking? I watched him turn my words over in his mind, thinking not about what I had said, no doubt, but what the best way to respond was.

“Hallie.” He said after twenty seconds or an hour, “I don’t know what to say here.”
“That’s fine. I actually have some ideas for you: ‘Hallie, I feel the same way and I’ve been waiting forever to hear you say that.’ ‘Hallie, I’ve spent hours thinking about how to tell you the same thing.’ ‘Hallie, I don’t see how we can be friends anymore now that you’ve made such an outrageous declaration of feelings!’”
“Really? That last one?”
“I weighed a lot of possibilities.”
“I think… I think I need to think about it.”
“Oh.”
“Not in a bad way!”
“It’s okay, you could just tell me you know.”
“I mean it Hallie, I just need to sort through. How long have you had to think about this?”
I paused, lowering my eyes. “Five months.”
“Five months!?”
“Yeah. Sorry… Had to be sure?”
“Well, I want to be sure too. One way or the other. I don’t want to ruin everything by making the wrong choice right here in one moment.”
In my dramatic scenarios, everything had happened in an instant. I hadn’t accounted for logic.
“I get it.”
“Good.” He smiled at me and I couldn’t help smiling back. He put his hand over mine on the table and squeezed it. “I have to go, but I’ll see you tomorrow and we’ll talk, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Be patient with me.”
And when I looked back up at him it seemed more real than anything. “I am.”