"There's pain in the fluidity of emotion" she said, as she sat staring through me from the porch swing in my backyard. I had so many memories in that swing, but looking back, this was the only one that mattered. "We only want things because they make us happy", she went on. In the moonlight I could still see the freckles on the bridge of her nose and her brown eyes through the parts in her auburn hair. "But you make me happy", the words struggling through my teeth, trying to escape and trying to hide at the same time. "You make me happy" I said again, as if she hadn't heard.
"No", she said. "Things change. I've changed. You want the girl who used to play with your hair and tell you scary stories. You want the girl who went stargazing with you out in the field behind her house and told you she loved you as much as the sky. She's gone, Sam. She's as dead as the flowers you've kept since our first date, and you know it. I don't make you happy anymore, you just want me to."
I stared at her then, the memories of the past 8 months pouring through my head and my heart and the hole in my stomach. "Why", I finally said. "I don't get it Meg, why?"
I don't remember how long we stared at each other then, but it felt like a lifetime. The night got colder and I started to shiver, but I only stood there staring into the same eyes that I loved so much.
"Remember the time we drove into the city?", she said, driving the silence back into the cold October night. "You bought us an ice cream cone to share. It was the middle of August and the sun felt like an oven and the ice cream accepted its inevitable pavement like a Fourth of July firework hits the sky...well, we're the ice cream, and the fall was nice, but we've hit the pavement."
"In fact", she said, her voice like ice now, "everything has", pulling me back to the cold scene on the concrete two weeks earlier. She got up off the swing, leaving it swaying back and forth with some invisible passenger.
Meg turned around one last time at the gate and looked me in the eyes. "I still love you", I managed to choke out, surrounded by night and cold and emotion. "We were strawberry ice cream, Sam", she said, her deep brown eyes cold and emotionless. I stared at the gate where she left, but she never came back. I felt empty like the porch swing, shivering in the October cold. "Don't go", I whispered into the night, but she was already gone.