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Well okay nice to see you


Elsewhere, hard to say where. A last couple of words, hurried, murmured, easily lost to quick winds. Not the bravura goodbye, the statement, the arms thrown wide. More a brief, tight moment, a closed world, two people in it for a fraction of a moment

Into what. She’s dissolved into the distance, part of the flex of the crowd in a matter of moments and he feels old phrases coming back to him, just part remembered parts. He once said something to her about how it was only a matter of time. The Universe would do something something something. He can’t remember the rest. Probably something trite. It was always something trite. It had dawned on him as he aged that he wasn’t an original thinker.

He’d even said, startled “you haven’t changed”

You haven’t changed? YOU HAVEN’T CHANGED? A dry mouth. Disbelief at the hackneyed phrase, but it’s always the truisms that come back to you in the pinch. Like “in the pinch”.

Amazing.

She’d once said that someone had said to her “there’s plenty more fish in the sea”, and how she’d wanted to hit them. With a fish. This time she just said “you got fat”.

“I…did?” he affected mock surprise, patting his belly and instantly hating every one of the preceding years when he’d got fat. When had that happened, exactly? She hadn’t. Of course she hadn’t. "I did"
And some few words later, already fading ,now elsewhere, hard to, well, anything, really. The crowds parted round him.

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