I Never Wrote About You

She is nine, standing on the edge of a lake, making a raft out of a large leaf and a half-blown-away dandelion flower. This lake is quieter and cleaner than the beach that she went to last summer, which was littered and sticky, even though it was on the edge of the Arabian Sea. On the edge of the lake, she can still remember the way that people were lighting candles and sending them out onto the sea. Her mother told her on the beach last summer that when people die, when people move on, when we have to let people go, we can make it easier by sending out a light into the water.

But she doesn’t have a light. So, she makes do.

I never wrote about you the way that you think that I did.

It was the middle of May. I took the Q train from that strange scalene triangle of a mess that is Flatbush Avenue and 7th. I was ambitious enough to wear sandals in Manhattan. The ambition turned to stupidity when we crossed over the East River and I felt a push notification: Light rain starting in ten minutes!

I got off at Canal Street and shimmied my way through the crowds, slipped myself uptown.

Everyone who passed me on the sidewalk looked down at my feet, and I knew that they were staring at my ankles with pity: Didn’t she get that push notification? Starting in ten minutes! They were so sure that we’d all be soaking soon, our cardigans heavy and our feet sopping wet from the showers that were supposed to dump down on the city that afternoon.

My phone vibrated again in my tote, which swung forwards and backwards, in tune with my light and carefree/careless steps. I kept walking, the leather of my bag whipping itself against my jacket, the way that the waves lap up the shore at night, the way that my breath slows down when I’m falling asleep, the way that your light snores reminded me of the rhythm of the ocean when I heard you the night before (when I kept waking up and couldn’t fall back asleep).

My phone buzzes again, pleading for me to slide one of the leather straps of my tote bag down my sleeve, down to my elbow, begging for me to ignore its vibrations no longer and instead: to pull it out of the side pocket of my bag and tap the large button at the bottom, unlocking the home screen.

There’s a text message from you blinking at me, expectantly:

You wrote about us.

“Slide to unlock” glimmers at the bottom of my phone screen, tempting me, poking me, gnawing at me, to reply.

But how to tell you? I cannot find the words — the words to explain my own words, the words to explain what you read, the words to explain why I write.

Your words stay with me, even as the leaves shift shades, even as we fall out of one another’s lives, even as the first snowflakes fall to the ground. I walk by Tompkins Square Park in the middle of autumn, and step into that bar where we ate oysters before either one of us could even call it summertime, and your words crawl back up my arm.

You wrote about us.

It is only as I try to cross 2nd Avenue in the middle of December that I realize: you are not here with me. And yet, here I am, still letting your words be the reason that I doubt the sound of my own voice.

She is seventeen and hasn’t yet learned to pick out the bullies from the friends. She goes with her parents to take a walk on the James River. The riverbed is littered with pebbles and leaves. She still remembers the beach, but she doesn’t have a light. She takes a pebble into her hand and throws it into the water.

But she doesn’t feel any lighter afterwards.

“So, all of these things that you write,”

His voice starts to trail off, but maybe he is just waiting for the cars to pass as we wait to cross the street. He finally finishes his question, his bright blue eyes punctuating the end of his sentence, hesitantly.

“These things that you write. Are they…real?”

I tell him yes and I tell him no. Doesn’t everything have an element of truth to it(.)(?) I don’t know if I am telling him or asking him, but what I do know is that I am trying to avoid the question. He pauses and takes my sentence into his hands, but I can feel the dissatisfaction in the way that he puts his arm on my back. He wanted a different answer from me.

But how to tell him? How to write him a poem and form the words:

It was never

about you
for you
because of you

that I put the words down onto paper, typed the words out on the page, scrawled illegible half-sentences in between the margins.

How to tell him: I never wrote about you the way that you think that I did?

She is twenty-five, and recovering from love/loss. She writes him a note, folds it up, and puts it away in her wallet. She remembers the beach even now, as she stands by the edge of a giant waterfall, her phone on Icelandic time. So, she pulls out the paper with his name and tosses it into the roaring surf at the bottom of the falls. It is only when she can’t see the paper anymore that she notices something: she can’t feel him as much anymore.

I wove you into my words so many times, but you never wrote a word back in reply. Not one sentence — not a single ripple in the stillest of waters.

And now I realize that, in the end, it was a good thing. Because what could I have possibly given to you in return?

How to tell you that the more I wrote, the less I heard the sound of you and the more I heard myself? How to make you understand that I don’t need to throw pebbles into a lake anymore, that I have found another way to let go, to move on? How to explain that I don’t need to make do anymore? How to find the way to say, to scream, to bleed every little bit of me right onto the page?

How to find the right words? How to tell you:

I have found my own voice again.