In all of the storms here I come to thinking
about Stephanie. Sometimes I forget about her and suddenly remembering
the way she smiled when I left her sends shivers down my spine. It's
been months since I last heard her voice through the wires, she was in
Venice then, we had spent a drunken week together in the canals and the
alleys and she called me just to say hello.
I always feel as if I
owe her something, a bigger piece of my heart or another way of
listening. It's a guilt that could tare me apart in the past but more
and more I'm learning to ignore it. The indifference frightens me, the
way I'm completely numb sometimes, and all that calms me down now is the
sporadic vivid memory of something I used to feel. It so often starts
with a dream.
Yes, that was a strange weekend.
No one knows what he said to me, Henry, just
before he left. Chloe has other things on her mind, I can tell from the
careful way she steps out of her shoes when she comes back from work.
The sound of it speaks more clearly than anything she could ever put
into words, her naked footsteps on the black marble in the hallway is
what authors spend lifetimes trying to write about.
We haven't
smoked together on the balcony since April, the memory of it seems like
from another life. I'm afraid we might be growing apart, she doesn't
talk to me the way she used to. It has happened before but this time
it's different, more acute. I hide in my room when she walks by, hoping
she will pause and lean against the door but she never does.
A year ago we were a wasteland apart, now the distance between us seems bigger than ever.
There's a certain density in the air now,
encapsulated in the raindrops, it keeps me falling in and out of sleep
until the morning. I dream intensely and wake up in the dark, the heart
in a violent uproar, all I can wear is thin layers of lace and his
intrusive absence.
This morning on his side of the bed, something
about a dream I had forcing me to reach for the letter I wrote to him,
the one in the night stand drawer. My fingertips brushing against a soft
piece of fabric and the warmth of the air turns to ice in a fraction of
a heartbeat.
On top of the letter, neatly folded and smelling
vaguely of his cologne: the black Givenchy cardigan I got him for his
birthday. Hours later I still can't escape the image of him placing it
there, of him finding the letter, reading it and putting it back before I
could see him, and of him saying "I love you" just before he left, not
letting me know if he had read it or not.
I can't stand the indolently happy, the sound
of their shallow blathering is excruciating torture like needles through
the skin, a Shakira song on a crowded dance floor. Every fourth of July
I'm reminded, how they would swarm around me like insects awaiting the
fireworks, celebrating a fraudulent freedom.
Mother would always
be too busy watching her hair in the late night breeze but my father
would see it just like I did. We would so often share the exact same
thought and I told him because I needed him to know. "If you die" I
said, "I will too". "Don't ever think that" he replied with a muted
voice, looking wistfully into the distance and the dark.
A year
later on the fourth of July I was alone with them, the swarming insects,
the indolently happy and their platitudes, wishing for a storm to wash
it all away.
