Composition

When did it all begin?
I try looking back over our years, searching for the signs that I must have missed.

Did you expect it all along? If a gypsy woman approached us in the street a year ago, say at that fair on midsummer eve, to tell you how you would go, would it have made a difference? Would you have looked at her in denial, and strove to prove her wrong? Or would you have nodded quietly inside yourself, as if you always knew that one day it would soon become too much.

Too much. The richness of the dark chocolate you would only eat, so bittersweet it would make your eyes water. The neon lights, flashing over and over in the same patterns, each minute, each hour, each day. The excess of wine, the too deep conversations, the stifling heat. The way my feet would always be too cold against your leg, the lack of pauses, commas, full stops. The boiling coffee you would spill a few drops of in the same place each morning. The tiny skeleton of a bird we found, the first time we looked on the roof. The smell of the Chinese restaurants, thick with memories of your first overseas trip.

I think the air was always thick with memories for you. The summer trees, under which you had your first kiss. The smell of another's neck. The salty smell of hands and feet and skin and hair after a day by the ocean. The rusting pipes in the alley next to the grocers. In the smell of gardens in springtime, the overwhelming scent of herbs and fruit blooming. The old leather jacket your father used to wear. The books I would bring home, to pulse hungrily through the pages, leaning in closer and closer. The smell of the first winter morning of the year, silent and crisp, the sharp blue sky, clear from clouds, as if a wind had blown each whisp away. Standing in a field, small yellow flowers dotting though the deep green, our feet damp with morning dew, hair brushed out of our eyes, surrounded by fresh, new light.
Maybe you just wanted to escape from it all.

And now that you're gone, how do we escape?
We float, we drift, as a shadow of life. We boil the kettle, open and close windows, take out the garbage, and live the ordinary life that we thought we lived before you. We visit the places we once went together, sitting in silence in the rooms that once held our laughter. We lose things, we find things, while never finding the thing we've lost forever. We call each other, each lonely ghost, to sit with silence on both ends, knowing but never saying that it was you who filled our conversations. We dream of old days, we use the memory of trees, of weather, of the yellow shirt and bare feet to create new memories, which still fail painfully, crashing onto the hardwood floors and the carpet with your coffee stain, shattering our illusions, so all we're stuck with is the glaring hum of reality.

Reality. In the bottles of wine, left over from goodness knows when, because I can't bring myself to do anything with them. Last Tuesday night, when I woke in the night, reaching over for your hand, your face, to find you were gone. In your sister's note she left, 'I'm sorry', only to say it over and over again in the recovery wards. In the trail of things, dropped in pathways, through doorways, on floors, because we have no strength to hold onto you anymore.

But we still can't let go.