Might you wake up without an inkling that this could be the best day in your life?
Brad had broken up with Carol in person, even knowing the parting would be painful. Her tears tested his resolve, but empathy wasn’t a substitute for evaporated allure. He’d grown well past the point where sex alone could sustain a relationship. Of course, physical attraction turned his head. As an undergraduate and as a psychology PhD candidate, he’d had several girlfriends, but he longed for a relationship with common interests, values, and the ability to sustain a quiet conversation. He’d come to realize that the most attractive part of a woman’s body was her heart.
As a pre-med student, Angelica had been drawn to buff types – lifeguards, surfers, and bartenders with bad-boy looks. She discovered that men with washboard abs often loved the mirror most and displayed little discernable ambition aside from getting her into bed and never growing up. Now in Medical School, the aspiring male doctors seemed self-absorbed, often a bit arrogant as they babbled after perfunctory sex. Paging through dating sites, she sighed with despair at ever finding someone worth sharing her life with. She was starting to feel her age, then reminded herself that she still had years of schooling and a residency before becoming a doctor, and she resolved to immerse herself in helping others – a satisfying and worthwhile use of her life.
Brad and Angelica attended a university with both a Medical School and a graduate program in psychology but housed on opposite sides of campus. They’d never met or even passed each other on the crisscrossing, grassy paths. Nonetheless, the Fates had weaved their destiny, weighing their future on golden scales – soul mates for all their days. They arranged that one of Angelica’s assignments would require borrowing a psychology text on a day when Brad would take his lunch sitting on the library’s steps.
Absently munching a tuna salad sandwich, so absorbed reading Camus’s The Stranger for his existentialism class, Brad failed to notice and be captured by Angelica’s slender beauty and swaying lilt as she entered the building. In her head, listening to Only the Lonely on her iPhone, Angelica missed seeing Brad’s captivatingly intense blue eyes.
At the singular moment of their potential encounter, the Fates were distracted, attending Zeus, and failed to intervene. Angelica disappeared into the library stacks and Brad finished his lunch, then headed for a meeting with a professor. With a sigh, Clotho unraveled their fateful skein and began again. Sadly, Brad and Angelica never knew the love that might have been, missing what would’ve been the best day of their lives.
Joe Giordano’s stories have appeared in more than one hundred magazines including The Saturday Evening Post, and Shenandoah. His novels include Birds of Passage, An Italian Immigrant Coming of Age Story, Appointment with ISIL (Harvard Square Editions), Drone Strike and his short story collection, Stories and Places I Remember (Rogue Phoenix Press). Find Joe at @Joe_jagintx and joe-giordano.com.
Photo by Redd on Unsplash.
