I don’t do winter is the only explanation she offered me at the time. To which she may have added
You know I’m not meant for this place, that’s what attracted you to begin with, but this is likely one of my mind’s numerous fabrications. We did, after all, have that conversation months ago.
Months which now feel like only a few days, a short vacation between life before and life after her. The last 48 hours however, for the sake of irony or contrast, seem to have passed by like years. She spent them elongating each motion to eternity, perhaps hoping as I was that if she somehow never finished what needed to be done, the time would not come. I spent them on the couch, watching her peel herself off the walls enclosing the space we had shared. All the pictures, all the postcards reminding her that there are places she has been to and places that remain to be seen.
How can I compete with an entire planet?
Watching her was like looking at a lost lover in the arms of her next conquest. Soon there won’t be a trace of her presence left; she won’t even leave me the pleasure of finding a discarded relic behind the bed. She’s siphoning all the physical evidence of her identity and her passage back into her bags with the precision of an industrial vacuum. She’s like the elements adorning her shelter – random and scattered, yet knowing where each piece of herself rests if she needs to reach for them someday. She remembers where she put each one to rest and remembers where to find it when it needs to be picked up and moved again.
I want to hate her efficiency. How absorbed she is by the elements of herself she selects as worthy of a place in her baggage, how she seems to select each one but me. A couch is a couch, a bed a bed, a lover a lover – all material possessions. She can easily find similar, perhaps better models serving the same functions in the next place she sets up camp in.
I am still on the couch, now watching her as she sits squarely across from me typing some final reminder lists on her laptop, the kitchen table and a row of neatly aligned suitcases forming the border that finalizes our separation. She is typing, intently typing, with the same look of concentration she had once given the tent she was pitching or the map she was reading during the short journeys she had allowed herself to take accompanied. And she types on, her fingers on the keyboard tapping the rhythm that will carry her along and away from me.
Already, you are in the place in my mind where memories live. I know how you felt, lying there on the couch – I heard the words your silence spoke, and someday I will let you know what I wish my own silence had found the courage to reply. In a long letter, written under a plum tree, or by a temple. Somewhere epic.
Trust me, I wish it were different. I wish I could have it all, that I didn’t have to divide myself between discovering me – a necessary pit-stop in my life, a branching out of sorts, for sight-seeing purposes – and continuing the trip by your side. I wish I could wake up to the smile in your eyes, holding that low curve in your lower back, breathing you in until my heart’s content let me know that I had been nourished from you sufficiently. I wish, that’s all I can do. I wish… and I hope that someday, someone a lot like you will cross my path… ideally you.
