It is a part of human nature to collect things. Accumulating, stockpiling, gathering. Items, memories, people, bringing each closer and closer to oneself, in an act to recreate in our minds eye the best and worst moments of our lives. It is a living, breathing, pulsing membrane surrounding each who dwells in the earth, each who fills one’s lungs with air. Silently, in gathering, one creates for oneself a finely wrought Interpol consisting of each heart beat, every conversation, every smell that ties itself to past experiences, the memory of the feel of light against the skin. And in this web, carefully yet unconsciously constructed and finely strung about one’s shoulders, we find dwelling in its midst a piece of the same person. You look somehow different to each who knows you, yet still vaguely the same. The same eyes, the same smile. Yet in each viewpoint, you change, however slightly, becoming more different and somehow more unique to each that knows you. Yet the same similarity stands for each who holds a piece of you- your unmistakable, tangible absence.
So when did it all begin?
I try looking back over our years, over the time we spent together, searching for the signs that we must have missed. You always said that time went too fast. That things should just slow down. That everything was just far too fast-paced for you to handle. I wondered if time functioned differently for you, whether days, hours and seconds just moved in a different pattern than for the rest of us.
That summer you made me switch rooms with you, from east to west, west to east. You said you couldn't stand how early the sun rose, that it was just a reminder of wasted days.
I loved waking up in the early morning, seeing the sun's first rays creep lazily through the slats in your wooden blinds. I had made you promise that I could keep them on your windows; you wouldn't need them in my room. So you slept westward, always waiting until the sun had set before entering your room, so you could forget the passing of days.
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, with all the lights, the garlands of flowers, the sweet smell of grass rising with the heat. If amidst all this, she had looked you in the eyes and saw everything we had searched so long for, and after that, cupped her wrinkled hand to your ear to whisper to 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 insist was the only sort you could eat, so bittersweet it would make your eyes water. The neon lights across the road, 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 you would bring home for me to pulse hungrily through the pages, leaning in closer and closer. The smell of the first winter morning of the year, standing silent and crisp against the sharp blue sky, clear from clouds, as if a wind had blown each whisp away. Holding the hands of your beloved 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.
And maybe, despite everything that we held, you just wanted to escape from it all.
I try looking back over our years, over the time we spent together, searching for the signs that we must have missed. You always said that time went too fast. That things should just slow down. That everything was just far too fast-paced for you to handle. I wondered if time functioned differently for you, whether days, hours and seconds just moved in a different pattern than for the rest of us.
That summer you made me switch rooms with you, from east to west, west to east. You said you couldn't stand how early the sun rose, that it was just a reminder of wasted days.
I loved waking up in the early morning, seeing the sun's first rays creep lazily through the slats in your wooden blinds. I had made you promise that I could keep them on your windows; you wouldn't need them in my room. So you slept westward, always waiting until the sun had set before entering your room, so you could forget the passing of days.
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, with all the lights, the garlands of flowers, the sweet smell of grass rising with the heat. If amidst all this, she had looked you in the eyes and saw everything we had searched so long for, and after that, cupped her wrinkled hand to your ear to whisper to 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 insist was the only sort you could eat, so bittersweet it would make your eyes water. The neon lights across the road, 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 you would bring home for me to pulse hungrily through the pages, leaning in closer and closer. The smell of the first winter morning of the year, standing silent and crisp against the sharp blue sky, clear from clouds, as if a wind had blown each whisp away. Holding the hands of your beloved 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.
And maybe, despite everything that we held, you just wanted to escape from it all.
And with your absence, with facing each day wincing, as if the bleak reality of it all had slapped the faces you once would kiss, how do we escape?
If I close my eyes I can see it the way it used to be. The way it was once, back when we were children.
If I close my eyes I can see it the way it used to be. The way it was once, back when we were children.
I carry around your memory, like a map in an unknown city. Like the cigarettes I promise myself, year after year, to give up. Like the smell of the sea, it's a memory that lives with those memories of you, dwelling in the recesses of the olfactory, waiting for the moment of remembrance, bringing with it waves of nostalgia.
I wanted to promise you the world that day. The day it smelt for the first time of spring, the air rich with light. The day we lay on the fresh morning grass and searched the horizon for clouds, regardless of the dew and the damp that seeped through clothes to touch our skin.
There was so much that I wanted to promise you, but even then, my glass heart relented, and I said nothing. For fear that I was offering more than you would ask of me, for fear that the earth, the sun, the sky, already had stolen your heart and you would have no more room for me.
You told me, years later, that you had waited for me to speak, thinking that your own lips were made of glass, and to talk would cause you to shatter into delicate shards and pieces in front of me. I shared with you the same fear I held, and we laughed bitterly at our loss.
For somewhere along the lines, we had been taught that though we are not made of glass, we still may shatter.
And thus, we became stone, deeper and stronger, colder and more distant, hiding beneath a thin layer of skin, of warmth and humanity. And the memory of what could have been, the joyful kisses each morning, the giving of one’s heart so completely and without abandon to another, was caught up in the fine lace of our existence, to hover above us in our Interpol as we attempted to live as broken things, pretending to be something more solid than we are.
And the day you left, that too was swept up, a cold grey memory to plague us in our sleep, to fill our web with memories of you, until we have no more room left for living, and the things that once seemed so natural abandoned us in order for you to maintain your place. Words to poems we once loved, lyrics to songs become lost, because they fail to remind us of you. Books read to us as children disappear, as our subconscious strives to hold you, to recreate you out of pieces of our own lives that we so willingly tied to yours. And suddenly, our whole existence becomes not our own, but yours, filled with fragments of ordinary life, in the hope that this shadow could contain you, and us, together.
So we float, as well as stones do, and drift, as in 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 these new memories, entangling us in our own webs, causing us to fall 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 scrawled 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.
This is another of those fabled short-story submissions I never go on about, but write all the same. I've put parts up in other stories before, I believe, but this is it, in it's entirety.
So we float, as well as stones do, and drift, as in 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 these new memories, entangling us in our own webs, causing us to fall 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 scrawled 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.
This is another of those fabled short-story submissions I never go on about, but write all the same. I've put parts up in other stories before, I believe, but this is it, in it's entirety.
i had shivers.
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