Gained and Lost

It looks like an ordinary parking lot. The asphalt’s been bleached a lifeless gray color by the unkind sun; scraggly yellow weeds poke through ugly, winding scars in the tarmac; carts lie, abandoned and askew, throughout the abyss. It’s hard to discern one parking space from another, the paint jobs neglected for years. Cars long come and gone decorated the lot with iridescent pools and bottomless black stains; discarded grocery bags flutter by like suburban tumbleweeds. It is, most people think, an ordinary parking lot.

Except it’s not. It’s not an ordinary parking lot. It was there, under the cloak of night, that you held me close and said you loved me; it was there that you told me I made you happy, happier than one else ever had or would; it was there that you decided we should forget all our friends and their judgment run away together. It was there that I fell truly, madly, irrevocably in love with you, and you kissed me with such passion it was if the world were ending around us—and it was there that you left me, just as the hazy sun appeared, blowing kisses to me and driving home to your wife, who you conveniently decided—hours later—that you still loved more, despite the blandness, the distance, the misunderstandings.

No, it’s not an ordinary parking lot. This is a parking lot of loves gained and lost, of stories that ended before they could begin—and now, whenever I walk past that extraordinary parking lot, I think of you, of the short, sweet time we shared together there, and—with an insincere heart and a head permanently full of what-ifs—wish for you a happy life.