WE KISSED FOR THE last time, before the clock on the microwave turned over to five, and he muttered that he had to leave. He told my aunt he’d be out by four, and he was already an hour behind, and he still had to go to work for the evening shift and get to his new apartment—“I took your word for it, and I bullied my friend—you know, the one who told me that fajita recipe?—into moving to the city with me. We’re subletting a place in the Village.”
So, he was going to be living in the completely opposite direction of where I would for the next seven years—above a Greek restaurant in Greenpoint—before taking over my aunt’s apartment. “I think it might work out,” I replied, biting in a smile.
“Yeah? I’ll take your word for it.”
We stood awkwardly for a moment longer at the door. And then I planted my hands on his chest and pushed him back.
“Go,” I said. “You’ll see me again.”
“Will I be as handsome as I am now? Balding? Oh, I really hope I’m not balding.”
I laughed and shoved him again. “Go.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, grinning, and caught my wrist one last time. He kissed the inside of my hand, and looked me over as if he wanted to commit me to memory. “I’ll see you in a few years, Lemon. You promise?”
“I promise—and, Iwan?”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry.”
He frowned. “For what?”
But I just gave him a smile, though it was a bit embarrassed, and a little sad, because when I did meet him again, I’d be so caught up with wishing he was who he’d been that I failed to see who he had become. He would see me again, but I was quite unsure if I would.
This was it. This last moment with my wrist wrapped in his hand, the afternoon light streaming in through the windows, bright and stagnant in a way only August light could be, that made his hair shimmer with reds and blonds.
I think I love you, I wanted to say, but not to this Iwan.
He kissed me one last time, in goodbye, and left to go catch a cab that he would end up sharing with a girl who wasn’t quite sure who she wanted to be, and wouldn’t know for years. They’d trade small talk, and he’d learn a secret, and then they would say goodbye in Washington Square Park.
The door closed, and I half expected the apartment to catapult me into the present, but the kitchen was quiet, and the pigeons cooed on the windowsill, and so I stood there for a long moment, my eyes closed, and existed one final moment in a time when my aunt was alive.
When she first died, I thought about what it’d be like to pack up my life and leave. Race my sadness across the world, and see who won. But I could never run far enough, not really.
I missed her every day. I missed her in ways I didn’t yet understand—in ways I wouldn’t find out for years to come. I missed her with this deep sort of regret, even though there was nothing I could have done. She never wanted anyone to see the monster on her shoulder, so she hid it, and when she finally took the monster’s hand, it broke our hearts.
It would keep breaking our hearts, everyone who knew her, over and over and over again. It was the kind of pain that didn’t exist to someday be healed by pretty words and good memories. It was the kind of pain that existed because, once upon a time, so did she. And I carried that pain, and that love, and that terrible, terrible day, with me. I got comfortable with it. I walked with it.
Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story.
Sometimes they left you without a goodbye.
And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the next.
I hated her for leaving, and I loved her for staying as long as she could.
And I would never wish this pain on anyone.
I walked through her apartment one last time, remembering all the nights I spent on her couch, all the mornings she cooked me eggs, the fingernail polish on the doorframe to mark my height, the books in her study. I ran my fingers over the spines full of faces we’d met and stories we’d heard.
Of all the people, all of the experiences, all of the memories, that loved me into being.
I heard the door open, and I stepped out of her study. Had Iwan forgotten something? “Iwan, if you forgot your toothbrush again . . .” My voice trailed off as I stared at the woman in the kitchen doorway, dressed in her traveling clothes.
She dropped her bags, her face stretching in confusion, and finally wonder. Then she smiled, bright and blinding, and threw out her arms. My heart swelled with grief and joy and love. So much love for this ghost of mine.
