Flash prompt - A single difference

I went to another meetup on Thursday and the flash prompt was "A single difference." The whole thing with flash writing is that it's complete within the time frame  - in this case, 50 minutes. So I haven't edited and pre-apologize for the clumsiness of the writing.

Lots going on in the next week and I may not be back before next weekend; hence, two in two days. Enjoy.

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So many ways.

In so many ways, he was just like every other man (boys, really, if she was honest with herself and Gawd if ever there was a time to be honest with herself…) she had been with in the six years since Adam had died.

She never seemed to expect more from any of them and so her social life became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This was not to say she dated monsters or drones, not at all. In fact, she would have been hard pressed to identify a common thread among her failed relationships that she should have been able to spot earlier, that might have allowed an earlier exit and relieved her of the painful, juttering descent, ending always and in all ways in the too-familiar denouement of emptiness.

Ralph was a good guy. Even today, a full year after she had deleted and blocked him, she had to admit it. A good guy. He smiled at her humor, looked adoring at all the right moments. He remembered her birthday, the solitary one that had fallen within the window of their time together. Polite to her father, complimentary to her mother. In point of fact, there really was no good reason why it didn’t work out.

But it didn’t.

She remembered her half year with Phil - Philo, but he ha-a-a-ted it and she was careful never to call him that - with a crooked grin. He was her intellectual lover, the one with whom she could spend hours in rapt attention to the topic of the moment, pretending to understand Proust and Aquinas and making throw away references to Great Books that she understood now neither of them had ever read all the way through. Phil was off in Minnesota working on his doctorate in philosophy and she occasionally found herself missing the sheer mental exercise of each trying to gain the upper hand in arguments over the issues of the day. Late nights with Phil were the closest she would ever come to manning the barricades in a tragically lost cause.

She glanced at her  watch and performed a quick calculation – landed at four, half hour to collect his bag, allow  twenty for the taxi queue and maybe thirty-five for the drive…Any minute now…

‘Really, this is bordering on the ridiculous,’ she thought. ‘He’s not a superhero, after all. He’s a man, he’s just a man, and I’ve had so many…. Okay, enough with the show tunes!’

Chuckling at herself, she thought of Willie. Willie could make anyone laugh; at least, he could always make her laugh. And he did, sometimes in the most awkward situations. Like the time she was on the phone with a friend whose cat had died. Willie decided that was prime time to dance naked with the single prop of a spray can of fake whipped cream. (There were sights that simply should not be seen by a woman trying to comfort a bereaved friend on the phone.) Willie would do anything for a smile and that’s probably what killed their relationship, truth be told. But a good guy. Yup, a really good guy.

They were all really good guys, each in his own way and with his own ways about him. But. But she never expected more from them and so, she never got more. You get what you look for, maybe. And each and all of them failed to measure up to the one with whom none could compete. Adam had been more than soul mate – they had shared a soul if any two people could. And how could a mere mortal compete with that?

She had given up looking, settled into a solitary routine in which she could feel comfortable if never quite comforted. And then, he seemed to have just shown up one day although they had known each other at a distance for years, in the manner of neighbors who can be counted on to bring in the mail when the other is away without taking the slightest interest in return addresses.

But one day, they both returned sweaty from workouts at the same moment and before either of them understood why they had each showered and dressed and were out their adjoining doors together in search of sustenance.

And maybe a bit more, as it turned out.

They became new friends and old friends in the same brief span of moments, a matter of recognition that passed between them unspoken. No thing led to another. They simply were.

He didn’t replace Adam. Neither of them demanded or yielded pieces of their pasts. What they were and all they had been – each and the other – was part of the thing that built between them seemingly without effort. There was no competition with ghosts or memories as they began to construct their own legend together.

And for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why. Why him? Why this guy?

Once he found out her middle name was Daphne he took to calling her Daffy at odd moments and she hated it but loved him for it. He studied her face while she talked, really studied it like he couldn’t get enough of her and couldn’t bear the thought of missing the smallest fragment of meaning or intent.

He opened doors and walked nearer the curb and cleared the dishes and told her when it was advisable to roll down the window. Now. Quickly.

Small things. Neither bigger nor more remarkable than a hundred things one or more of her previous boyfriends had done. There was truly nothing she could think of that set him above or apart from the others, no one thing that she could put her finger on as the reason she’d spent the whole day glancing at the clock in anticipation of catching sight of him for the first time since he’d kissed her goodbye on Monday as he headed to the airport.

Well, maybe there was one thing.

She loved him.

And that, after all, was the single difference that made her smile in spite of herself as he stepped through the door and looked around for her.