Dear S,
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It’s been a while. Thirty-two years actually. When I see that number, and the encrusted life I now own, it seems unnatural – perversely multiplied. It can’t be true that I still feel this way – a third of a century later – about someone I knew for barely two months. What a strange thing the memory is. What odd curators we are – shelving and cataloguing some moments but not others, of visceral longing too much unacknowledged at the time – irresistible, real and deeply strange, but now so divorced from the blood blind compulsions of our youthful senses.
I do know, of course, you are no longer here. I know that, of course. I heard the news from a friend of a friend – a text, some months ago. Almost offhandedly she told me: how odd I thought until I realised how much of what I’d stored inside was entirely unknown to anyone except myself. When she mentioned your death in passing, along with the odd lurching sensation of a silent fall from a tall building I saw you – in an instant – before me, in your black leather bomber jacket, your ever so slightly reddened by the cold March air ice blue eyes and your tight ponytailed dirty blond hair – perched for the first and last time on the edge of the bed in my flat on Redcliffe Gardens, applying lip balm habitually with your long fingers. It was your dry skin but so too an under-managed manifestation of your vulnerability, and so a flash of hope that you weren’t en-tirely lovely and perhaps not en-tirely beyond my reach, after all. You didn’t stay long, perhaps half an hour – but your visit meant something I suppose neither of us could bring ourselves to acknowledge, then or afterward. Time had run out before I realised the clock was running. I loved your silly travel letters from Tokyo and Adelaide, hashed out on flimsy blue paper in terminals and hostels.
Aren’t we just animal spirits? First, predominant, hormones bursting, bloody and startled, resplendent and chattering without the time, need or inclination to reflect? Then spirits more, reflecting on what we did, what we felt, our animal selves dutifully contained or compromised by an embarrassment of later riches and failures? I don’t have answers S-. I only know that I think I can recreate what made you you, that even now I want to recreate what made you you, without ever having had the chance to discover it then. I’m our last remaining record-keeper. Without me we cease to exist. I suppose, after all those months since I heard, this is what seeped into my consciousness, that I feel the need to speak to you, to make up for lost time and lost chances: chances not taken when I knew there was some spark between us that only required one of us to ignite, with some trivial act of courage. For whatever reason, neither of us embraced the courage we might have had. Perhaps we felt it was inevitable and thus unnecessary to hurry along. We’ll never know. It’s too late. But what do I do otherwise with all these evergreen thoughts? Do I pile them high, at last, on the bonfire at the bottom of the garden and stand, contemplative, alone, as the particles of a life unlived dissemble themselves in the intense heat and float way into the winter night as I stand shivering in my borrowed winter boots? Do I preserve them in jars, for occasional inspection? Or should I reanimate them, bring to them new life, that we might not cease to exist after all?
Forgive me now if I choose the last. I feel it is something I should do – that I want to do – as selfish as it sounds. I’ll treat you fairly, I promise. Only I want you to come alive again, in some way that only I could bring about. I know you wouldn’t mind, entirely too much.
