The Waking
The voice escapes you now and what is left is mostly tactile; you'd still know the feel of him anywhere, know it better than his face. His hands - spanning your rib cage - marking all the good-byes he never said into your bared skin. You taste the ghost of his cigarettes in your every lover's kiss. You stopped loving the boy years ago; his memory doesn't haunt you. But it hovers on the edges of your senses and it's enough to make you unreachable.
Lorelei was right about that, at least. He never did you any good. You could only guess what he took from you. Nothing irreplaceable, yet, standing in the void he left behind, you no longer felt inviolate. You're not much good at lying to anyone beside yourself, but you can say that he was your first and your soft mouth and your lazy eyes will swear that it is true. Unlike Pygmalion you work backwards, creating your counterfeit from warm, breathing reality. What you don't say is that he'd gotten out of there. Running. This time for good. You fail to mention that he had a gift for not being. There. Open. What you wanted him to be, your high-rope dancing hopes and adolescent dreams.
The shattering end proved that he was none of those things. Jess was a reader and a critic, not a writer. Another way of saying that he was a coward. He'd held back until the awkwardness between you built and solidified. Like a character in a book who holds no responsibility over his own actions; thinking things happen because they must, and there's little he can do about it. He wouldn't have thought to blame himself if his life took a turn towards the inevitable, all droll disappointments and empty cliches. A bad novel that never peaks. You've long stopped blaming him for that.
All this you kept from Luke and Lorelei, of course, not wanting to disturb the clumsy silence that you've come to associate with the sound of his name. You taste something like sorrow at how he could vanish so completely. He left no photographs, would snatch the camera away every time you tried to take one. Which was hardly ever. Photos were for proms and anniversaries and you never had either. You think his eyes must have been brown. Brown like the eyes of every boy you've loved starting with him. You can't imagine falling for any other set of eyes. Only weeks after starting at Yale, stopping for gas on the way to Friday night dinner, you opened the glove box and found a tape he'd left behind. And cried for the next seven miles without knowing fully why. That tape was still in the glove box some years later when the car got stolen. Then you had only his small, tight writing in the margins of books that you had stopped reading, one by one.
You've been to Delhi and Singapore, Moscow and Istanbul, trailing mentholated cigarette smoke like a heroine out of a Bogart film. You figure you have another three years at most before all the papers in the US do rid of any overseas news that's not from the middle east altogether and leave you just another polylingual journalist without a job.
Then your mother died and you had felt never so alone. So when the touch of his hand came to you (your face, belly, the underside of your arm) you held fast onto your ghost and never let go. And sometimes you don't know just who is more lost out of you and him. Who is floundering and who has already stopped trying to breathe.