ONE

I never forgave her. Not really.

It sticks in my chest when I think of it. Even understanding it better, now, even with all the perspective, with the hindsight, with everything…

I think of her and I see her face so beautifully, painfully, incredibly clearly. I hear her voice. The sound of her laugh. Her fingers, stumbling over the keys. I bet they stumble less, now. I wonder.

Sometimes I dream of a sword, thrust to the hilt into drywall, hanging above my desk. My kitchen table. My bed. Wherever I rest, there it is, stuck fast and firm, hazardous.

The danger isn't in falling out, of crushing or cutting. It's in the staying in, in hovering there, unforgettable, resisting closure.

Even with the perspective of it now, it's there. In my chest, instead of the wall. Maybe they're the same thing.

I guess that's the truth of it, of being young. You never really belong to anybody. You say you do, you swear it north, south, and Sunday, but it isn't true. And nobody belongs to you just the same way. The ties that bind are chewing gum. Some of them will harden over time, sure, but it'll never be cement. You have to reaffirm, when you're older, make those connections fresh. And they're better that way, I'm sure of it.

I keep dreaming of those people I knew when I was a kid. Keep walking back into familiar words with footsteps unfamiliar, a confident gait I never had back then, or only pretended to have. I try to hold onto the details, as if they mean anything: freshly installed kitchen cabinets, stained a rich walnut, or the dog they adopted years ago who's only just now big enough to jump up and say hello. Meeting all these things for the first time, and so meeting them again, this person whose hand or heart I held.

And held mine. Maybe that's why I've been so resistant to reaching out. Not afraid I'll fall back into it, that they'll touch me again — but that they never actually left. That the fingerprints are still there, the indentation of their touch on my heart, like impressions in clay.

That my spine and myself were only ever that malleable. That I was never upright and strong, that I never left that behind. Shed my skin. Donned a different cloak.

I never forgave her. That's the point. And I think I never will, if I can't express it in those words, the words that are true, to her face: that I loved her, and I didn't realize how much, and in the natural course of the world she left, and moved on, and I was left behind.

Because it was never intentional. There was no real injury, no thrust of a sword. She left for college, and never looked back but twice, and only then to tell me how happy she was. And maybe that was the closure I never knew it was.

Can it be that I am only realizing it now?

She did let me go. She told me his name. Years later, the last time I saw her, I shook his hand. He's tall. He's good to her. They harmonize, together. They have a life.

It's me I can't forgive. It's me who didn't let go.

I wish you were here, grandfather. In some ways, I know that you are. But not in the way that could teach me to make a path away from the past with the dust of it, the sediment that surrounds me, the sand in my eyes, the smoke in my lungs…

I'll burn the words, like you always said. Make clay of the soot, and form something from it. Make art of that which seems artless, that randomness of life, as beautiful as it is chaotic. But I can't put it on my desk, some Trojan Horse, small and subtle. I'll put it away, in some cupboard somewhere, and shut the doors.

And wonder, then, maybe, if she wonders, too.