This Is A Story For A Good Friend

My partner left me one early morning in September.

She took a few things with her and she left a few things of hers behind. I found her black umbrella in the kitchen and her favored pen still on the table, cap off, ink refilled, waiting for her hand. She had made coffee, It was still warm when I came home. I sat across from her side of the table on that first morning, watching the pen and the empty paper and the empty seat, thinking empty thoughts. I breathed the steam of her coffee. I felt its warmth in the mug under my fingers.

These moments tallied themselves up in my mind, the last coffee, the last mug. I was a poet and she was a poet, and with true poetic faithfulness she had left me as it rained. I was grateful. I spent that morning alone in the kitchen, listening to that gray pattern falling on and on and on outside on the asphalt, thinking of her lemongrass soap and the sweep of her dark hair.

She haunted me. I knew she would. She kept pace with me on my evening walk, first that night and then another. She watched the sunset with me that first evening, the sky awash with lavender and fire, spectacular, her presence enraptured at my side. She whistled in my ear as I measured loose-leaf tea into her abandoned teapot sometime after midnight. When I tripped over my shoelace while making my way back up the stairs I heard her voice call out to me. Darling, please be careful.

I washed my hair with her lemongrass soap that morning.

The neighbors worried over me. Their concerned voices wove together behind my back and drew about me like a blanket. Honey, I am so sorry, how are you holding up, give me a call if you want to talk. Their dogs nose my hand and pant when I scratch behind their ears.

I strummed aimlessly on her ukelele. My friends called. Her friends called. I checked the caller ID for each call and answered none of them. I tried tuning her ukelele and turned too tightly: the string snapped back across my arm. Darling, please be careful.

I took the broken ukelele and walked out into the dark. The moon was almost full above me. Traveler's lantern, eye of some indifferent god. The neighborhood came alive some nights with the howling and barking and panic of our dogs. I knew this, and I walked as quietly as I could to my driveway, but our dogs are psychic, our dogs have the hearing of television superheroes, our dogs know that they will have failed their canine directive if they do not herald the moon and me. Lostgirl night, dogmoon night. I whispered an apology to no one in particular and turned on my car.

The dogs began. The moon continued. I did not look back as I drove away from our home. Around my car the dark landscape rose and fell in monstrous shapes, a looming tower, a plunging marsh. The ukelele was cast in shadow. I turned on my radio, received only static, and switched over to the CD player. A guitar joined me in the car, a man's voice mixed with the engine. And admit that the waters around you have grown.

Her favorite song.

It would do.

I drove towards the west.

Mercifully, the west was eternal. I found small towns as I drove through the night, a scattering of buildings, a few sleepwalkers whose hair the wind blew about like ribbon. But all of these shapes and sights lost their constancy. I watched them drift to mist from my driver's seat, indecipherable from the air and darkness. They, too, were becoming secret. I set her song to repeat and it began to echo on and on, and that was when I pulled my car to the side of the road and lowered my face into my hands.

Sorrow is all-consuming. There are no words to detail its devouring ache, the way all light and bright things are unmade by its hands. My girlfriend was gone, my girlfriend had vanished with the season of leaving. And all I wanted to do was to draw the world into harmony with my hollow heart. So there I was, one more body gone out to the west, the land where parts melt into wholes. I wanted to be dreamme, wandering the skyground and its varied grays and darknesses, dreamme searching for ghostgirl below the dogmoon.

But I did not find her.

I drove on and did not find her. It is one thing to know that human beings are not moons, that they do not wane and wax and return again from emptiness. It is quite another to search the length and breadth of the west for yourself. I had long ago left the last of the towns behind me. The absolute that I had wandered to was no place for shapes and sights. No extra moments, no stolen time. Doors without knobs or keyholes.

The dogs heard my return. I took the CD from the car and went to stand on the mouth of the road to watch them, roused by the clatter of my old engine, come to mark me and welcome me. I went to their fences and scratched my favorite below the chin. How warm the animal was, how full of life. It is no wonder that we had Anubis, someone who shared this wordless consolation for the unspeakable. Hey, buddy. And her voice, darling, please be careful.

I will be careful. I turn towards home. The rain continues on. It listens to me wash my face and brush out my hair. It listens to me bring one of her stuffed bears down to the kitchen and place it in her seat so that its plastic eyes peek over the table. It listens to me put the CD into my computer and set it to that first song, let is play alongside the churn of the coffee pot. I don't mind. I have left the west and moved on into the present tense. It is sorrowful yet. You would think that the taste of coffee would change somehow, that the dogs would go silent, that something would be different. I am still a hollow girl, a heartless girl, a girl who wants no sound besides this one Bob Dylan song.

But I am in the present tense now. I am moving on.

#myfiction