History in the Blood

"Because," she would whisper for his ears only in a tiny closet of a restaurant where, until the mindless stars disappeared to give way to the careless sun, they had the audacity to fall in love, "I can smell the history in the blood of the river here." He didn't understand, but she couldn't see how she could be more crystalline.
They held hands with silence until the coffee in front of them had gone cold and then, even then, they still watched each other. It became clear that the reality of his fantastic illuminated night terrors was that, without a doubt, he never really met her. She had the tendency to drive faster on the streets and slower on the freeway, he noted, but he never could deduce why. She, as she would have explained it, had no desire to see the millions of unhappy faces that she could be confused with. Anyone could see the resemblance between two people who have eyes, and beating eyelashes. On the freeway, she was just by herself.
It felt to him like the musicality had left her voice and been replaced with a sense of concrete phenomena, gold embossed to remind him more of the cloudy city streets of London than the laugh that used to remind him of nighttime on the ocean.
"Is that it?"
With an ironic smirk, she responded. "Of course that's it! What else is there?"

In that moment he thought, for the first time, that maybe love isn't as great as everyone had cracked it up to be.
She stood without another word and left.
But as soon as she was gone, he realized that yes, yes love was exactly as great as they had cracked it up to be.
He could still smell the remnants of her perfume on the air that she had been breathing. Lucky air, he thought.

Outside, she let herself shed a single tear before she started to walk. She had planned, esoterically, to forget about the nuisance of gravity in order to step back on the time space continuum. She left because she knew she would never love again. There was a funny sense of freedom in knowing that all your worst feelings are packaged behind you.
She stepped on the grassy knoll where he first asked her if she had directions to the supermarket. She directed him to a dodgy bar in the East End where she sat waiting for him, holding his heart and his reverence in her left hand while her right held a dirty martini.
They laughed that night, all night, and for the next 364 days.
Today was 365.
She never spent more than a year in one place.

She pulled out her ticket to everywhere and disappeared.