The lighter feels heavy in my palm as I stand by the window of my 32nd floor apartment, watching the city’s kaleidoscope of lights blur and sharpen with each blink. Round, silver, worn smooth by years of nervous fidgeting - it was his lighter originally.
“You shouldn’t smoke so much,” he used to say, eyes crinkling with concern even as he’d extend the flame toward my unlit cigarette. The irony wasn’t lost on me.
The city stretches endlessly below, a maze of concrete and steel where millions of stories intersect and diverge like subway lines on a map. Somewhere down there, he’s probably getting ready for work, straightening his tie in front of a different window, in a different life.
“Do you ever feel like we’re just pretending?” I asked him once, during one of our late-night conversations that meandered like smoke rings in still air. “Like we’re playing at being adults, at being in love?”
He took the lighter from my hands then, clicking it open and closed with a metallic rhythm that punctuated his thoughts. “Maybe that’s all anyone ever does,” he replied, “pretend until it becomes real.”
The memory dissolves like morning mist as my phone buzzes with a message. It’s from him, of course - timing was always his forte.
Coffee?
Simple, casual, as if three months haven’t passed since we last spoke. As if I haven’t spent countless nights tracing the circular patterns on his lighter, wondering if closure is just another form of pretense.
“Sometimes things don’t need an ending to be complete,” my sister said last week over brunch, her words barely audible over the clatter of plates and the hum of café conversation. “Some stories are better left unfinished.”
I type and delete responses, watch the cursor blink like a heartbeat on the screen. The lighter weighs down my pocket, a constant reminder of all the words we never said, all the promises we never quite made.
Outside, the city continues its eternal dance of light and shadow. A siren wails in the distance, its echo bouncing between buildings like a prayer. Or perhaps a warning.
Maybe next time, I finally reply, knowing “next time” will hover eternally in the future, like the horizon line that never gets closer no matter how far you walk.
The lighter makes one final appearance in my hand. I flick it open, watching the flame dance briefly before letting it die. Then I place it carefully on the windowsill, a small silver circle catching the city lights, a full stop in a sentence that trails off into silence.
Some endings aren’t really endings at all, just pauses between breaths, moments suspended in the space between what was and what could have been. The city knows this - it’s written in every unfinished conversation, every missed connection, every almost-but-not-quite that populates its streets and high-rises.
I turn away from the window, leaving the lighter behind. Tomorrow, the sun will rise over the city again, and somewhere, someone else’s story will begin with a spark.