Fragment (2015)

I wanted her to hold on, to keep holding on, to refuse to let go. I wanted her to protect those letters, those mornings walking past the black iron gates and over the misty bridge, those things that I had to let go. I wanted her to keep me, keep us, even though I knew that the only part of me that she’d be able to keep were the artifacts of memory that I had so desperately created while we were together, strung together in paper and ink over lonely hours, quiet waiting, and a continent and an ocean apart.

Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she will. Maybe she won’t. Because those things are where I can’t be – can never be – I’ll never know.

I live with my own memories now. Of a quiet girl with long blonde hair who loved kisses and books and coffee and lingering breakfasts and who loved me. Of dew sparkling in the English winter morning and a hand that always found mine. Of a city that I gave up everything to return to. I have memories of all that, but what I remember most is that on our last day together, I watched snow fall through the window of her dorm room, not really understanding that all we had would melt away, not really understanding that all I would ever be able to do is look back and find that she had gone.

This is where I leave you.

That's what I said when next I saw her, two summers and two bruised hearts later, as I tried to summon the courage to say something else to mark another goodbye. I stumbled, as I always do when I speak. Here I left you, here I found you. A wanderer's words, stolen from some esoteric handbook and clumsily handed over to a girl I loved on a September morning at the end of a summer that might have otherwise been entirely owned by misery. Speech, like patience, like hope, like love, like so many other things failed me.

Poetic as that sounds, the reverse is true. I failed in speech, just as I did in patience and hope and love and so many other things.

When I kissed her on the forehead, unspoken words lodged in my throat, I realized that she was wearing the same perfume that I had carried in my jacket like a talisman next to my now-long-gone rosary. There were no words for that either and when I looked back, trying to remember lines from Orpheus, trying to remember the last time I looked back, I drowned in longing. I sat for a while on a bench, trying to find a way to rewrite, rescript, do everything that had just happened over again, but when I turned around in the crushing hope that she would still be there, waiting for me, she was nowhere to be found. 

That is where she left me. 

(Published on private blog, 2015)