The Lost Date

A Story by modesty blaise

Should she wear the turquoise lace dress? Or the brocade dark blue one with the deep cleavage ? Or maybe the red and cream one that will go nicely with the red and gold shoes ? She was looking at herself in the mirror, putting on dress after dress, feeling more and more unsatisfied. An antique box of jewelry laid open and strings of pearls, porcelain brooches and silk roses flowed endlessy on the night stand. Suddenly her face lightened up as she fitted her midi white with blue flowers dress and decided it looked really nice on her. She played with with the long pearl necklace she put around her neck and smoked a cigarette in the mirror imagining she was one of those wild flapper girls ready to go at a high-class fancy party in a luxurious mansion in 1920’s New-York, or maybe Paris. She wasn’t going nowhere near as fancy though. Nor with the remote possibility of meeting someone even slightly interesting. In fact the guy she was supposed to date was very plain both physically and intellectually. He kept saying “I’m bored” whenever she chatted to him online because that’s where they met, imagine that. So many interesting things to do in this life and such little time. She wondered how could anyone that is still not in secondary school say they’re bored? Funnily enough though, he was the most decent one she had found in the bizarre world of the internet, even though she had kept on searching and searching and chatting and chatting. She hadn’t been on a great date in many years. Ever since he said “for the last time” and broke her heart. She knew right then and there she had lost the love of her life. The waves were too cold and menacing that day to let herself be swept away by them, even if she wanted to. They called to her in a sinister yet comforting voice, howling and waltzing, back and forth, back and forth. She hadn’t seen the waves, nor him, ever since. But she kept on hoping that maybe one sunnier day…. He would welcome her in the same sincere way that the sea would. He would smile to her and be touched too see her again, and maybe feel a little bad about hurting her so much. He would wipe her tears and she would embrace him, really embrace him, like he was all hers and not with the fearful, hesitant hugs she had given him in the past, almost as if she knew he would never be hers. She had bought all these dresses with him in mind, wondering if he’d like them, wondering how he would react seeing her in them. He always had the most amazing and heart-warming reactions. Back when he admired her and was interested in her little thoughts and everything she did and the places she went to that she told him about, she really felt alive. She felt like she mattered and that she was a very important yet small part of the whole universe. She hasn’t felt this way in a long time. His rejection left her feeling isolated, like she was thrown out somewhere on the edge of the world, from where she could only watch and not participate in life. She felt invisible. The guy she was about to go out with tonight made her feel invisible. She lit another cigarette and started looking through an Art Nouveau book she had bought recently. Art has been a great comfort to her lately. She hoped to escape her anguish through aesthetic contemplation. She lay upon her bed looking absorbed at the beautiful Belle Epoque ladies, the pre-raphaelite muses, the entangled nature deities of Alphonse Mucha, the serpentine dance moves of Loie Fuller captured forever on the glossy pages she held in her hands, and suddenly she started hearing a faint jazz music reaching out to her far into the summer breeze… warm lights were flickering among the flowers and the trees… a roaring of crystalline laughter and a humming of voices were heard as elegant young women and handsome men sipped from their absinth glasses… As if not wanting to disrupt the slumbering haze, the phone discretely kept on signalling the notifications from facebook messenger: “Are you ready to go out?”, “Are you free later on?”, “What are you doing?”, “Hello?”…