042. You're not as now as you think you are

The present had a habit of showing up, unannounced and uninvited –if they were honest, it was a bit of a bastard about it.

Tammy and Daryn had reconnected on Facebook, fifteen years after they’d last shared the same oxygen. Although they were nervous, they were also excited. They agreed to meet at a nearby bar at 8 – he was late, she was early.

When he saw her, he thought about the things she had been at 17. A short skirt and a shy smile. The occasional glance at him from her spot next to the window geography. $3’s worth of chips from the fisho after school. A center-court spot in the netball tryouts. And the heat. If Tammy was anything, it was heat. Sweat and company, as she fought for composure on the long summer afternoons of their adolescence.

She thought about all the things he could have been. A steady income, and a father for some children. A warm mass in her bed. A revolutionary, fighting to change the world into what he always said it should have been. And a presence, soft and earnest and constant, in her otherwise transient life.

Somewhere between the fifth and sixth drinks, they kissed. Boy and girl, love and longing, past and future – joined together in a moment of temporary whole-ness. But then the present showed up and ruined everything. No idyllic past. No unspoiled future. Just incomplete, unfulfilling now.

They had tried to pretended it didn’t exist, but the present still hung in the air between them. It darkened things. Like secrets and ghosts and second-guesses.