How You’ll Remember Me
No one tells you when it will be the last time. And now, sitting here, staring out the window at all of winter’s trees that are hanging their arms so low (so heavy with last night’s ice), this little idea comes into my head that maybe: it’s because we don’t know that it will be the last time that makes it so hard for us to forget.
The middle of November, before the first snow of the year.
We eat grilled lamb and drink red wine and the two of us are the last ones in the restaurant. We can’t bring ourselves to leave because we both know that the two of us have to go in opposite directions. Wrap ourselves up in layers, and walk out into the west village. “I still haven’t worn my winter coat yet,” you say bashfully, cheeks flushing pink. My boots stomp down on the concrete as we hop from one block to another, crisscrossing between the trash bags and recycling bins that sit outside of the brownstones with tall windows on 14th Street.
I walk with you further than I really need to — I could have taken this train home, or the one we passed five minutes ago — but somehow I want to walk alongside you for a bit longer. We finally walk down the subway stairs that lead us underground, swipe our metro cards, and walk into the middle of the station. Wrap your arms around me for a few seconds, then walk towards the uptown platform while I walk to the downtown one.
How you’ll remember me: the girl who was always running five minutes late, and covered her eyes for the scary parts of movies (the parts where they cut someone’s finger off in revenge).
How you’ll remember me: the girl who couldn’t eat spicy things, who you met in a park once, who loved bars where the shelves were lined with books.
Ten o’clock at night in the heat of May — a month so miserable that even the birds don’t want to come out and sing during the day because no song seems like a good enough excuse to bake in the midday sun.
Pull on the sleeves of my cardigan even though I’m sweating because they always make the airplanes so cold.
You take out the handkerchief that’s tucked into the pleats of your sari, to wipe your nose, to wipe your eyes — an action that you don’t know that I observe every single time that you do it.
Pull both of my hands in palms of yours, your hands like mirrors of mine, my mothers, echoes of mine will also be on some day that’s yet to come. Look at me, the curves of my cheeks and the sharpness of my nose, as though you are trying to trace the edges of my face in a way that you could remember it forever, after I’ve left, after I’ve gone, after I’ve landed in a country that’s on the other side of the world.
(You will fall down the stairs a few months later and hit your head and lose all memory of me forever.)
How you’ll remember me: the shadow of your own daughter, a bit quieter than her but just as eager to tug at your hair, to run around behind you, to follow you from one room to the other.
How you’ll remember me: the shadow of you, where the light that is all around me lets me grow long and tall so that no one else in the world will have any idea from my shadow of how small I really am.
A cold night in March: you are still wearing your leather winter boots. We have a beer each, and then we have another, beads of condensation collecting on my marble coffee table, two suitcases tucked away in the corner, a candle that smells like carnations burning away on the kitchen counter. A space between us: two feet wide on the couch, two hundred feet in my heart.
You turn your shoulders ever so slightly to show me a video that’s slowly loading on Youtube: teenagers who wear skis, tie themselves to the back of an SUV, and try not to die in a snowstorm. I hug my knees to my chest, trying to get close enough to watch the video but not so close that my heart will start to think of you in that way again. We listen to music and you tell me about the book that you have been reading, and how I should read it, too.
(I buy that book seven months later.)
It gets late. I know this because when there’s three and a half sips of beer left in your pint glass, you take a deep breath and say to me without looking me in the eyes: “It’s getting late. I should go.” Walk to the door, cross my hands across my chest, and watch as you lace up your boots again. One last time that you look down and I look up, our necks in the angles that we always seem to end up in because you are so much taller than me. I kiss you on the cheek instead of saying goodbye. Close the door behind you. Blow out the candle. Walk back over to the coffee table to rinse out what you left behind.
How you’ll remember me: the storm that threw herself upon your quiet, silent cliffs, crashing wave upon wave, creating more surf and sound than you had ever wanted.
How you’ll remember me: the storm that came into your life in the only way that a storm ever can: unpredictably and without hesitation — only sticking around just long enough until she decides which direction she wants to go next.
No one tells you when it will be the last time. And now, sitting here, staring out the window at the snow on the ground and the half-frozen lakes, this little thought comes into my head that maybe no one tells you other things, either. Things like how this long life can sometimes be cut short. Or things like how this big world is actually rather quite small.
So I sit here, counting the snowflakes and wishing to myself that maybe: that last time wasn’t even the last time at all.
