The Journey Home - Close Encounters

 Please note I added an extra detail to the story after I had recorded it. So the text and the story are not  exactly the same.

2 years ago today I started a blog of short stories inspired by Rory's Story Cubes. As time went by the stories didn’t need the cubes. But the cubes will forever be part of the blog. To celebrate my blog’s second birthday I’ve returned to the cubes. 5 stories inspired by those 9 cubes. The blog has asked me to ask you not for presents to celebrate its birthday but for comments, shares, likes etc. Let’s get this thing going viral :-) 

Do first loves really last forever or was that a myth perpetuated by pop songs which eventually create a reality of their own?  The songs establish the norm, so we magnify our feeling based on the romantic drivel. John debated this in his mind while he waited for the arriving passengers to disembark, so he could board the plane. He always thought of his first love when he was heading back to Wales - her smile, her left shoulder and the point where their bodies met. He remembered the happy sad times they spent together. The times they spent in her bedroom in her mother’s house, pretending to watch TV, the passionate sex and the passionate rows and that night laying on the beach watching the shooting stars when she told him she was leaving him for Mark. 

John always found going back ‘home’ strange.  Berlin had been his home for nigh on 15 years, home was the place he lived in now not the place he’d grown up, learnt to love, learnt to drive. ‘Home’ was a strange town, full of strange faces, full of ghosts of a past life he barely remembered or recognised. Each time he went ‘home’ he wandered the street of his hometown, looking carefully at the faces of the people, wondering if they were old friends, old foes or old lovers. 
He remembered Dawn, the 19-year-old girl who left him for the manager of Woolworths. He didn’t have a clue what she’d look like now. Maybe this time he’d bump into her, he guessed it would be nice to see her after all this time. But he’d only be back three days and one of them was the wedding so the chances were pretty slim. He watched the last remaining passengers leave the plane and then found his boarding card so he was ready when boarding started.Seat 23 C same as ever. 

Dawn stood up from seat 23 C and got off the plane and followed the exit arrows towards the baggage reclaim. She'd heard John lived in Berlin now, but that was second hand news so she wasn’t sure.  She'd spent the flight wondering what he looked like. How much he'd have changed and if he still occasionally thought of her like she did of him? She wondered if perhaps she might bump into him over the next three days, and would she even recognise him if she did? She remembered the boy with the cheeky grin kissing her under the trees of Coxmore Park, not a 40 something year old. And anyway what would be the chances of bumping into him in a city the size of Berlin?  She glanced at the passengers waiting to get on the flight then took her husband's hand and wandered towards the exit.