Hello.

It’s strange, isn’t it, how the farther away you go from a moment, the less time matters? I missed you with a fury the day we left, my chest aching with every breath, through the Pennsylvanian highways with my heart snagging on every bare brown branch, my breath curling through the glass in grey longing. Then through the familiar New York City streets, an ugly urban sprawl compared to where I left you, standing in the middle of that garden in the rain; I traced your name onto the misty windows each time I thought of you. The fingerprints are still there if you breath warmly on it, but with each blow the words fade just a little, and now I’m afraid to look at it for fear it’ll stop existing. I think of you the same way, now, and I doubt you think of me at all. If I take out these memories too many times, I’m afraid they’ll crack and crumble to a fine powder, diluted with wind.

But tonight, I call them up again, maybe for the last time. I wanted to see your face again, hear that lilting lisp. I was so afraid, when a week after I returned I could not call up exactly how you said my name. I thought I’d lost you.

Do you remember? How you found me in the side study behind the double doors, both closed, ears plugged and gazing thoughtlessly at the calligraphy painting high up on the wall? No—we met before that. The awkward silence as I walked in, the guests already seated and our host gone, bereft of introductions so that I stood to the side, uncertain. I was still annoyed at my parents for bringing me here, I thought I had better ways to spend my time but I didn’t know I would meet you. You didn’t look at me, even when I prodded the uneasy crowd into soft, awkward words my name is I go to eastern university yeah he’s my little bro come here kid! The names piped up like notes in a scale, but you ignored me until Kevin kicked you under the table. You smiled and waved hi, I’m Matthew and that was when I first thought you were beautiful, because of that smile. Yours was the only name I remembered the first time I heard it, that night; did you know mine so quickly? Sometimes I wonder, but I’ve never been brave enough to ask you, now that you’ve forgotten me.

The way we moved together, a team, against Kevin and my cousins at the ping pong table—the ball beating hollowly against the green surface to the rhythm of your boyish insults. The look on your face when I slipped away, letting the two of you play, and how the happiness shone from you when I relented and took my place again by your side. I played the best when I played with you, but you don’t know that. Or do you? Do you really think I’m so skilled at this game?

Your eyes are the brightest I’ve ever seen on a boy, but I never told you that either. My mom teased one once that you had ‘puppy eyes’, so beseeching and innocent. She knew I loved eyes like that. You watched my face intently when I sang along to my earphone music, softly, head cocked as if you were listening. Your embarrassment when curiosity took hold of me and I asked why you spoke that way—I wish I could have taken it back the moment you stumbled, eyes lowered; I felt the cut sharper than you did. You said it was from learning pronunciation through reading and I believed you. Our newfound peace, fragile in the minutes it had been alive, was another thread in the string, then rope that tied me to you. Did you ever realize that I know the truth, from your mother to mine to me? Did you think I would like you less because you’ll never hear me sing? The things I’ve never told you beat against me like an army of angry fists at a wall sometimes, until I cannot breathe and it is so hard to keep from crying out loud, crying your name.

The way you tapped me on the shoulder, lighter than a sigh, tingles through me like a shiver. Even now when I think of it, of the way your hand felt on my arm, so gently, as if I were a beautiful porcelain doll too precious to risk breaking.

Does that picture, with the fish and the eyes—does it still mean anything to you? What did you see when you watched me sketch, watched the shapes emerge in a swaying sea of crosshatch? You said they looked like fish, I laughed and agreed, but I was drawing a pair of eyes. In the end they became both fish and eyes; two little fish nuzzling noses for the first time, a pair of glowing scale eyes from the darkness. I loved how you turned a work of one to one of two.

I’m brimming, bubbling with the memories of us until I feel carbonated through and through, but we were only together for a day and a half. I counted the moments we had. That night I gripped the pillow until the fabric creaked, using my sheer will to drag you back for the next morning. And you came! I woke, but you were gone, but then you returned. That carefulness around you, again as if I were untouchable. How Kevin teased you to sit in our car, because my dramatic little cousin who was so afraid and adoring of you and how hard you could pinch him—when you showed me on my arm, the pressure wouldn’t have turned on a light; I wish it was warm enough for short sleeves—was with us, and how you shook your head uncertainly. That careful distance when you took the seat besides me on the bench, surrounded by artificial fog and exotic greenery, when I desperately wanted to press myself against you—

God.
I wonder sometimes, if I’ll ever be able to stop.

The way you said goodbye the way you read lips the way you won’t turn around at your name the way you peeked curiously from behind the curtain of leaves to see me on the other side of the rushing water, snatching the moment with my camera, the way we said goodbye through a drab, drizzling rain and how I didn’t feel horrible yet because I could still see you and I was sure, so naively sure, that we would see each other again soon because how could fate be so cruel? The way you walked at a safe distance from me when we shared the umbrella because you’ve never had a girl before.

I think, sometimes, that I might have loved you.

Goodbye, the boy for whom I would have given anything. Tonight I’m leaving here, and I don’t think I’ll be back. Maybe twenty years from now we’ll pass each other on the street and you’ll have a little daughter clinging to your neck, a pretty young wife with her arm around your waist and laughter like a blanket the three of you cuddle under. You wouldn’t recognize me, I’m sure, and maybe I won’t be looking up and the moment will pass. But one thing I know, and it is this: I will be alone. Because I know now, and probably have known from the day I met you, that I love you still, and I will love you forever. Only you.

yours truly,
the girl you don’t remember.

PS. I still have the picture, where the two little fish are forever meeting each other for the first time. I’ll send it to you tomorrow, and maybe I’ll send this with it. But really, the picture is so much more than these thousand words.


Anonymous
10:52:00 PM