Shells

A man on television last night recounting a story about his late wife: she couldn’t bring herself to face the outside, her entire body would rise and climb like a flight of stairs.

He swept roads and she stayed inside, time passing through glass: the silver morning fields, the green breaking through, disappearing with the night, gilded again the next morning. She couldn’t touch it, the change made her head shake. The distance is moving ever further away and there is no way to hold it back.

They used to take the train to the sea on hot days, eat fish and chips from old newspapers by the shore. Before going home, he would feel the ocean on his feet one final time as the dark came down. Later, when the train was working its way through the sunset he would bring a hidden shell from his pocket and present it to her as a gift. This evidence of history, this expression of meaning, reverberated through the years like a mantra. Even when she turned it all off he would still travel to collect those shells, thinking it might be enough to pull her back to him, to put herself back together, though it never was.

She died of it, or something else. She was there in his arms. She loved him and then she was gone. It took him a long time to get over it. He is telling the story now, tomorrow, until memory. He has survived through a compromise she was never willing to make. He allowed it to pass, and it went. He is not the same but it went, and now he goes on. This was their difference. The summer days return. The blue never left. The shells collect on the mantel.