Suitcase in hand, backpack slung over your shoulder, unruly fringe shading your sad eyes, you bend to flick an air kiss on my wet cheek.
‘Have to go’ you say.
Your musky cologne fills my lungs, numbs my brain.
‘We’ll be in touch.’
Yes, we will, but it’s Katherine’s picture in her one-piece swimsuit you’ve got in your wallet, not mine. And it’s the Swatch she’d given you for your birthday you’re wearing around your wrist, not my Omega.
You think I don’t know who’s taken over your heart now. But, I guess, that’s life. Everything flows and nothing stays, like Heraclitus had said. The younger always replacing the elders.
I haul myself off the sofa and make to grab you by the nape of your neck, craving to nuzzle it the way I used to, but I stop short. In the past you didn’t seem to mind but lately you’ve been shouldering me away.
‘Get off me!’ you’d say.
‘I don’t want to get off you. I don’t want to be left alone,’ my thoughts find their ragged way out of my mouth. You look at me in exasperation that soon turns into commiseration.
‘It’s only four years mum. Till I get my degree. Then I’ll be all yours,’ you give me a warm hug and dart out the main door.
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Sozou-Kyrkou Konstantina is a Greek writer living in Athens but writing in English. She has studied Literature and holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University UK. Her short stories have appeared in the anthology ‘Even Birds are Chained to the Sky’ by The Fine Line Editorial Consultancy and online by several journals such as The Wilderness House Literary Review, The Missing Slate, Tincture Journal Issue Three, Five Stop Story, The Literary Yard and Bareback magazine (this November issue).
