Flash Fiction - Rebound and Giving Up Greece

I thwarted Anselm's pure love for an obscenity.

"Remember," he said when we parted at Shelly's arty little apartment in Maastricht, "I am not in another world. Call me if you need
anything or if you feel uncomfortable about something."

Urged on by Shelly who, like me, did not realize Anselm's deep depression, and thought him a monster for rejecting my embraces after I had crossed oceans to be with him, I called to tell him I was going to Amsterdam with a stranger I had met in a bar. A pause on the other end of the line before Anselm, with his angel feet as soft as petals, not meant to tread the earth said,
"Uh huh".

On the train to Amsterdam, giddy with the sheer adventure of it all, I gazed at the frozen landscape glide by and thought that despite Anselm's rejection, I was still the seductress: I had been invited to see Amsterdam by boat.

I brought in the New Year on Stef's swanky salon boat amidst more strangers who smoked hash, while I watched green laser beams streaking across the freezing skies, and realized with a sick feeling in my stomach that I could never love
the satyrical Stef.

Giving up Greece

As the train moved out of Amsterdam Central, a woman caught my eye and pointed at the misty window where Stef had written the words, 'I love you' in reverse so I could read them. I smiled all the way to Frankfurt airport even though he had never uttered those words to me during the week we had spent together. I had wanted him to, not because I loved him, but because I wanted him to love me; I was the femme fatale.

Today I am the spiritual seeker wary of the transient pleasures of the flesh that have held me captive for so many years. So, after two years, when Stef invited me for a holiday in Greece -- a place fascinating because of the Greek myths and the blue blue sea contrasting so beautifully with whitewashed houses -- I invited him to the temple of the Laughing Buddha in Bangalore. Yet my first instinct had been to order myself a red flamenco dress that would look so good with the blues and whites of Greece, and dream of visiting Diana's sacred grove. Giving up Greece turned out to be the right thing to do, for even in Diana's sacred grove, I would have been traumatised by Stef's expectations of me.