The note lay under the bed for ten years. She realized this when she finally moved. The room had been abandoned the day he left, and the day that she honestly came to herself that love wasn't for her. And so she had waited, in that corridor, between decisions for a decade, and when she finally moved to the new house, the one on the shore by her grandad's old place, the one she had played in as a child, the one she had slowly rebuilt and repainted, she found the note, absentmindedly picking it up off the dust on the floor, thick as it was, like a gray carpet.She smoothed the brownish paper, the paper of a lined spiral notebook. And she thought about nothing but the oddness of visiting the room again, like an old hospital ward, now empty. And she glanced down at the piece of paper with a start of recognition, something like the feeling of throwing up, but as if the feeling had aged on a shelf for many, many years, and now was a searing sort of sick pain. But just for a second. Until she read the words.
there wasn't one thing i didn't love about you
however, the same could not be said for myself
and when the lights went out
i wrestled dark embraces
reaching up to me from
underneath the bed.
my gift was words
and yours was embraces
my gift the movement on and on,
and yours the methodic sort of
waiting for change.
anyway, i wanted to say
i'm sorry
i really wish.
It hit a lot like thunder, a little like a mudslide, somewhat like fire. It built in her, the strange emotions all wound up like old, old, vines, the fine buds of shame and still-banked unsettled emotions rearing up, quiet and tired, but still alive, ever so little. And then she crumpled up the paper and threw it away - away on the wind. She was sorry too. But a note was not his body next to hers.
picture, Vilhelm Hammershoi, The Poetry of Silence, Royal Academy of Arts, London
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