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You will not remember this but I will even as I grow old, and all that is me has withered and collapsed on itself like a tired house, this is the memory in which one single window will be lit by.
It is of you, sitting with me on a hill that we climbed up on a few years back. I can’t remember when you had started to looked different to me; determined with a touch of yearning as you looked at the see saw we used to sit and balance on. It used to be painted a cheap bright red colour but now it’s rusted out and is permanently fixed leaning to one side, like our memories of that time.
Next year, we both didn’t know it yet but we would be moving away from each other. You’d get a new job offer and I’d be moving to a new state because of my studies. We’d keep in touch here and there; your dad was diagnosed with cancer and Jelly, my bulldog would pass away, I’d say how was your day, then how was your week and then how was your month. The days became catching up with our lives rather than living in it. Every meeting with you felt like it started with a goodbye and meandered into polite conversation. There was nothing wrong and that was just it, we lived in limbo moments of “laters”. I’ll see you later, I’ll call you later, later… later and finally even later.
But that day on the hill. I asked you what you were thinking. You chewed your bottom lip and pulled the grass around your feet, making a small heap between us. There was something important you wanted to say but you were trying to say it in a way that didn’t come like a train hitting me.
“I think I’ve fallen for someone,” you blurted.
The train rushes by, rips my breath away and all I could hear was the rails thundering over my heart.
“Oh, who?” I asked, but it was like a dream, a horrible dream that I wanted to wake from.
“Stephanie,”
Stephanie. Stephanie. Her name worked itself around my brain like a worm, trying to stick itself to a face, a reason as to why you would ever love … ever fall for her. I swallow the words I wanted to say and they go down like razors, cutting me all the way inside. Once, those words had been given a form shape, almost became real but now they remain a used up possibility.
We talk for a while after. You were so beautiful in your excitement, eyes bright and expectation lined face with a hopeful future, one that I was not a part of. You asked if I had anyone I was seeing.
“It’s rotten work, loving me,” I had said after a while.
“No, not if it’s you,” you replied.
You didn’t say the first part of that quote. “Not to me” because that belongs to someone else now.
When we first met some part of me came alive when my name was called from your lips and some part of me died when I last called yours. I knew you as Lily, now I know you as Mrs Pelliote.
It’s rotten work, all this love stuff. Rotten. So when I kissed your fingers back then, you didn’t know it but I left my heart in your hands. It was in your care because that’s where it called home and when we finished our meeting, I could only watch my home walk out on me forever.
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