Resurrection

Every time it rains in the morning it feels like the first day of fall.

I'm still afraid of switching my phone on to see if he's written or called. I've stopped checking my e-mails and keep asking people in the village if they've ever heard of Avy Stanford. No one has and it makes me breathe a little lighter, at least for a while until it all comes back to me like missing heartbeats.

Easter came and went, like Christmas it never meant anything significant to me as a child. At best they were times when we overcame our dysfunctionalities and pretended we were a family for a couple of days. Mother would tell me stories from her youth, all of them fabricated but from honest intentions. My father would look at her with love, the way he remembered her from when they first met (this is what he told me). I would say that I miss those times but it was too long ago and I sometimes think that every damn thing has changed somewhere along the way.

Closer than ever before

I'm renting an apartment somewhere along a quiet coastline, just to remember what it was like to be alone. There's a small marina nearby but no yachts, just fishing boats and seagulls and abandoned restaurants. I can see parts of it from the little French balcony, the wardrobe in the bedroom overflows with ivory white lace blouses and the light curtains smell distinctly of cigarette smoke and old people.

I write more than I read but nothing gets finished. Every day I start working on a new letter, addressed to him but with different sentiments depending on the dreams I had the night before. I tell him about sunrises and sunsets, about people I meet in the bakery and about how I sometimes want to be just like him; how I know that sometimes he wants to be just like me.

I write outside and in bed, by the water or on a cast iron bench between the house and the towering mountains just off the coast. Always by hand, always knowing exactly what I want to tell him, but the part I never get to is when I ask him if he'll ever accept me back.