Nearly Departed

You walk off the stage, taking longer than you should; then again, time is something that never quite occurs to you. It’s early May, the time just before end of school sets in, and the crowd ebbs and flows over us like sand being stirred from above. The sun dips behind a cloud as I shove my fists further into my pockets, feeling around past a melted chapstick and crumpled $5 bill. As you pack your guitar into its case, looking to most like you’re tying your shoes, my feet make a beeline toward you—tugged by an invisible thread over some long plain of silence that breaks open in threes: one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three hold. Suddenly, color gets sucked from the sky. I forget how to be. Late afternoon on a lawn full of teenagers, waiting for one of them to call out your name—or mine—one of us, anyone, just so the other will know what sound to mold our mouths around. I’ll stand in the parking lot afterward, hoping to catch a glimpse of your back as it ducks into a car, something to ground the wave—the almost impossible knowingness—of having already held your face in my hands. “Fauxstalgia,” a friend later calls it; or the feeling of fact, of intense reverie, over an experience you haven’t yet had. What he forgets to mention, however, is the way this truth pounds in the chest. The unfurling that occurs, like a flower that turns toward the sun.

       There are stages to every story.
It was broken down for me, once, like a table of elements: Boy meets girl. (Girl frets about hair, boy hugs girl from behind.) Boy loses girl. (Girl cries into hair, boy stares longingly into faraway ocean.) Boy gets girl. (Girl gets grip.)
Life goes on.
I let this wash over me as I sat with my back against the water, skin crisping in the midday sun like a leaf held under a magnifying glass. Two blonde women approached from the opposite trail, and I knew at least one would feel obligated to stop and tell me, like she was delivering some indispensible truth, that I’d need to wear sunscreen. I’d thank her, smiling so my lazy eye doesn’t crinkle, in that way I always do when I’m still in control. Sure enough, they stopped—matching pink Nikes glaring up from the concrete—and the shorter one leaned in so her breath caught the wind. “Careful,” she said. “You’re really burning up.”
     “Thank you,” I blinked at her, marveling at how many people go out of their way to tell me this. Like my fair skin is a revelation, something that only they see; as though by alerting me, they’ve done their good deed. Like I can’t feel the sting on my face. Like I don’t know my own transparency.
      Meet, lose, get, I wrote again and again, circling the middle word like a fish in a gaping whale mouth. It’s the course of every good sitcom, every meaningful romantic comedy. What’s not lost cannot ever be appreciated. Still, the words oozed like a drone onto the page, and I wondered why my dad said that what’s yours never leaves you: because most things of love do, at some point, evaporate. They were never really yours, he’d argue. Right. But the thing is, I never meant to own them. I only wanted something to fill in the blank for each memory made, or made up, or whatever: to be hit in the heart from the right type of drum, because frequencies cure. Just someone to wait for at a stoplight.


I’m walking with hay sticking out of my sandals, hay pushing in from the toe and up under my arches, dirty with campfire ash and silty mud. High noon, and the late winds of summer play games with my hair; the bare field ahead opens up like a yawn, heat streaming out of its mouth. Sweat drips off the end of my nose, and I’m aware of your presence nearby. I don’t know that it’s you, exactly, or that you’re even here; but if asked, I’d say that my skin is on fire. I swim past the row of vehicles that scream back the cloudless sky, feeling the gaze of children who have not yet un-believed what they sense bursting out of my body. I see you emerge from behind a partition, a full head taller than the boy in the Thin Lizzy shirt, and feel like I’ve swallowed an apple. I can read the hours you’ve spent in the sun from the shape of your skin, like rings in a tree. Your head’s to the left, laughing at something Thin Lizzy has said, and I somehow forget to forget: suddenly, I’m left only with you, with the moment before you turn your head, and the sensation of skin beneath fabric. Thin, like a sheet. A blue dress in early August. I wonder if your smile matches your steps, and it could have been hours. Then again, we both know how heat plays games with the body.

       I put down my pen, coming back to the park and the river; my back against the water, earthy smell pouring out from the trees. Each time someone ran by, my hand snapped to my hip, to the place where my phone wasn’t buzzing—no more than it was five minutes before, and five minutes before that—halfheartedly searching each jogger’s vibration for some sort of message, or truth. I pulled the phone out from my pocket and stared at it, scowling. It stared on, feeling nothing. You pathetic fuck, it said. How did you come to be owned by my face?
Earlier that morning, in front of an online yoga class, I pulled socks over my hands to keep them from slipping. A pupil-less woman in tight pants and ponytail laughed as her leg bent back over her head. “Don’t worry if you fall out,” she told me. “I fall out all the time.” Lies! My calves began their violent shake, and I plopped to my knees. This bitch wasn’t fooling me. “Whew! I know I’m certainly feeling it.” You don’t feel anything, you stupid robot! I pulled myself onto my belly, forehead flat against the tile floor. “Find the place where you’re about to fall over,” she twittered, “and hold it there.”
“Hold.
Hold.
Hold.”

With my head on the floor like that, I thought that I felt my phone buzz.

It hadn’t.


The third time we meet, it is from behind. Your shirt smells like cigarettes, and I know that my window is closing. Before you turn around, I place my hands up to my wooly hat, then move them down over my eyes. This is my face. This is my collarbone, my shoulders, my chest. My stomach, my pelvis, my knees. This is my hand. I am see-through. From your back, I can feel you surrender. My lips on your ear. I lose track of my life and would drive the car, drunkenly, and a dozen more things that refuse to make sense; but somehow, you hear me and smile. Cards drop out of my wallet, and I force myself to notice: to remember that I’ve already eaten dinner, that I don’t really like beer. But certain things wobble and fade when your hand lifts my hair from my neck.


       The breeze came up over the water, exhaling across my notebook with a definitive huff. I traced my fingers along the coarse pages, outlining words, starved for the feeling beneath them. A butterfly drifted by, lazily matching the wind with its attitude, and I wondered if bugs can feel loss. What if it missed its chrysalis? Did anyone ask if it wanted to change?
Clearly dehydrated, still stalking my phone, I pulled myself up from the rock. On my way to the drinking fountain, I remembered a friend who believed she was being followed by butterflies. “My girlfriend died in a traumatic way,” she told me, bopping the pedestrian signal with her thumb as we waited to walk. “And the energy felt clogged. I could feel her around, like she hadn’t crossed over.
“But when I started seeing butterflies, I knew it had happened. She had left. It changed.”
With my head dipped down to the fountain, I thought of my own little ghosts. When somebody’s home is a shrine to a breakup, photos of the recently evanesced looking down from each surface that sticks to her face, eyes following me as I wade through the space left behind. The nights that I drive home from work and a song hits the radio, packed with the outline of someone I’ve tried to forget. My house isn’t haunted, I’m sure…but those stop signs? They’re brutal. I cry for our unfinished business each time that I brake.


This time, our meeting is the sum of three parts: One, a bus with a low overhang. I smack my head as I duck into my seat, and sitting with my knees curled into my chest, spin soft words of comfort inside. Two, a porch and a man eating a turkey sandwich. He offers one bite for a dollar, my eyes drooling over the bread, but I decline. Three, a swarm of people with paper cups in their hands; recognizing a girl from the bus, smiling, then remembering how I’d hit my head. Disappearing, embarrassed.

Body, blood, spirit.

I finally see you from across the room, white hat hovering above a mountain of sweaty curls, and dip my head down to find lipstick. Reemerging, I fold through the crowd, moving forward and to you like an electric current, like a pulse. That familiar draw. You tumble back from me, clutching your heart with your hand; and I know, suddenly, that I’ll fall. I’ll fall even though I designed this room, imagined it with all my heart, picked the wallpaper and dotted the carpet with flowers and placed myself in it, all of me, with a jeweled star in my hair and shoes that stay soft when I walk. When I dance.  

In the alley behind the bar, we look at and through one another, gingerly tossing each word in to see if it sinks. You ask for a lighter, I think you say ladder. You walk away, and a man pushes past. You here alone? He asks. Yes, I reply. Oh, he says, raking his hands through his hair. You don’t look like the kind of girl who comes here alone.

But I did. I come here alone every time, rifling through circumstances, searching. And I remember, when I see you: your cycles, your glue. This is what it feels like to have missed someone for a long, long time.

You return, but your eyes stay focused on the person just behind my left ear. I know that my window is closing again, that glorious in-between granting a moment of touch, and I pull my chin up to your shoulder. A sloppy kiss, then I float away: feet moving aimlessly, knowing only that it’s time to go. I’m sure that you’ll speak, so I stare straight ahead—but suddenly, sense your retreat. It’s strange how the spine recognizes Alone: to contract then relax, sure only that you’ve somehow stopped watching me leave. 2 a.m. on a Sunday, 65 degrees, and I’m not too small to feel pain. What’s terrifying is to think that maybe, at some point, I’ll feel nothing.


I wiped my chin on my sleeve, finally coming up for air, watching the last of the water bubble its way down the drain. Behind me, small notes caught the air as someone noodled their way through a clarinet waltz. I began walking away, but paused when the music halted.
“You writing a book?” a voice asked.
“No,” I replied, turning around. A boy with long, stringy hair stared back at me, clarinet perched on his knee, squinting his eyes in the sun. I cleared my throat. “I’m writing a letter.”
“To someone in prison?”
“No.”
“Oh,” he sniffed, placing the instrument back in its case. “I didn’t realize people did that anymore. Write letters, that is. Other than to people in prison.”
I waited to be released, but stayed mysteriously rooted as this stranger loped toward me. Before long, we sat: tracing patterns in the dirt with our fingers as I spoke to him, and he listened, about the past lives in which I’ve met you before. I don’t know anymore, I squeaked, words jamming in my throat as I tried not to cry. I can’t tell if what I’m remembering is real or made up.
He paused, thumb making a crescent moon shape in the soil, then spoke softly. “Do you know what ‘idiosyncrasies’ are?"
Kind of, I told him. I think so.
“Well, I’m not sure, but I think they’re this thing where you meet someone, and you have the feeling that you’ve met them before; but not only that, you’re remembering how you felt the last time you saw them. Only you’ve never met. But the feeling lingers, like muscle memory…and it’s like you know you’ll love them, because you always have. Because you’ve done it before.”

I remembered you, then, and the blue dress that streamed out behind me. I’ve held you in my muscles for so long, you know; I can’t help that you’ve haunted my bones. Breathe through them like air; let me float in the knowingness, knowing your bones. Sifting through all our lifetimes like sand.

“Anyhow, I’m pretty sure that’s what it means. People were just wrong.”
We sat for a long time, neither one speaking, watching the sun fall behind the water. “What is it?” he asked finally, drawing his hands up into his sleeves.
I want, I told him. And it played like a tape in my heart.

I want, I want, I want, I want, I want. 

      He leapt up, suddenly, wrapping me in his thin arms like a bird. I breathed in his smell as we hugged, but nothing stuck. “I see you,” he said, smiling crookedly as I pulled back. He furrowed his brow. “Are you going to write a book?”
“Yes,” I decided. “Maybe.”
“Well,” he said, brushing off his knees as he stood. “It’s going to be good. Maybe.”

~

I made my way down the hill, past the ducks treading circles in water, past the women in sneakers and babies with soft heads and gums. What happens to all the wishes I’ve hurled toward you? Are they stored until next time, preserved under snow? I think of it, still, when I pick up a dandelion. My mouth makes a wish before I try to explain; and sometimes, it even comes true. Other times, I wash away the small superstitions that tether me to your shape, and I live. Maybe this time around, you will see your own shadow. This time around, maybe one will stop drifting away.

     In the end, though, I’m not worried. We’ve done this before. And if asked, I would do it again.