The Writers' Circle

They used to tell me I should get out more.
	They were the same people who told me to study more.  
There was always something I should have done, but didn't. I guess there are some people who do the right amount of everything, but I've never met one. We all have routines. We all do things because we have to and another set of things because we want to. Any alternative isn't sustainable.
	I went to the jazz concert, alone, for reasons that I was afraid to tell anyone. They wouldn't accept it. I wanted to run into Kira. Kira disappeared. I had to let her be, although she wasn't giving me much of an alternative. With no forwarding address, I was supposed to forget her.
	Jessa helped me with that. When I was with her, I had to concentrate. There was no way around it. She had rules. As long as I followed them, I would do fine.
	Jessa was good for me. She was the type of girl Dad wanted for me, although Dad was never that specific. He liked Kira. Everyone liked Kira. Jessa never caught Dad's attention. He knew about her. I took her home for dinner several times. Each time, he barely spoke to her and never spoke about her. That meant I had his approval. Just not his blessing.
	I never told Jessa that, but Jessa knew. She was working on impressing him and she might have succeeded. But she stopped because I wasn't worth it. She found Kira's birthday marked in my planner and went ballistic. What I should have done was tell her that I'd done it out of habit. I was Over Kira. In that one moment when she found out, I lost the energy. I told her I still though about Kira and, given the chance, I would have taken her back. I knew Kira found someone else and I was still craving explanations. Kira had taken off in the middle of the night, leaving me along with her abusive father and a sizable fortune. Did it all look the same to her?
	Jessa wasn't sympathetic. I didn't expect her to be. She dumped me and I went to a concert alone, forcing her to go to dinner with her parents without an escort. Jessa would call back. She always did. She just had a temper. I had another chance. But I didn't want to use it.
	There was no way Kira would be at the concert. She was in Paris with her broke boyfriend. It wouldn't last, but Kira would only come back to America for law school. Law school in New York.  
	She wasn't there but the lighting was so dim I could pretend she was next to me, smiling, whispering into my ear. She liked jazz, but she knew it too well to leave a concert without a critique. They should have relied less on standards, she would have told me. Their own material was so unique- stories of what it was like to be in your twenties now rather than in the nineteen-twenties. The rush to start a career and find love, or some replacement that just felt right. The anxiety. The endless contemplation.
	I left alone and then she caught my eye.
	She was almost exactly Kira's height and build, but the comparisons stopped there. She looked stern, while Kira always smiled gently. Her half-sneer couldn't hide the fact that she was attractive. She had red-brown hair and brown eyes that were focusing on something.
	Our eyes locked. 
	I thought back to the concert. There was both a male and female vocalist. The male vocalist sung mostly standards while the woman sang more original pieces. The original pieces were about the plight of the modern-day woman. Mostly about love. How hard it was to find someone and keep an attraction. Narratives on what was going on during the dates that followed the first- she was wondering how long it would last, how far it would go, what she should hope for.
	I felt like I was with one of the women in the songs. During the concert, I wanted to reassure all of them. One day, things will work out. Someone will be worth going all the way for.
	When she turned, the streetlight glimmered on her engagement ring. She should have been smiling. She was at a good, secure place. 
	Only she wasn't.
	And I wanted to reach out even more.