DECEMBER 1918

He said, "Let's get out of this town

Drive out of the city away from the crowds"

I thought, "Heaven can't help me now"

Nothin' lasts forever

But this is gonna take me down

Jay's letters are scattered around me like Autumn leaves from the day he left. I read each one again and again as dutifully and diligently and dancer trying to learn a dance. I tear apart each word as if somewhere, inside one of them, I shall find some secret meaning, some hidden treasure that, like a magic, will explain everything. Explain why he has not come home, why his letters have ceased. I know he is alive. I check the list of lost souls almost daily and there is never any Gatsby. And he is the only Gatsby.

But I find nothing. "Where are you?" I say aloud, as if he can hear. "Where?" I say more quietly, more desperately. He left just over a year ago, and I spent almost all of last Winter wrapped up in bed, wishing the duvet could offer me the warmth and the protection that he did. And then Summer came, and every where I turned, I was haunted by the memories of the year before. Every night I saw us standing on the balcony where we first met. I saw us dancing in the hall, running through the gardens.

The end of the war brought hope. I went to train station every morning and watched the hundreds of soldiers cry of joy as they stumbled off the train into the arms of their lovers. And I waited. I watched the reunited couples drift away from the station to their homes until I was the only one on the platform. I waited every day until today.

Now the snow has begun to fall, winter has arrived, as smug as ever, and Jay has not come home.

Say you'll remember me

Standin' in a nice dress

Starin' at the sunset, babe

Red lips and rosy cheeks

Say you'll see me again

Even if it's just in your

Wildest dreams

I do not go to the station anymore. I wait at home. He'll come to me. He'll come.

I say this until Christmas Eve, when I learn from a friend of my mother's, who knows a lady, who has a husband high up in the army, who works with a man from Jay's regiment, that Jay is now a man of academia. He is studying at Oxford University. Jay is very clever, he'll surely be a great philosopher or scientist or reader of literature, whilst I will be the beautiful little fool, the teenage girl he loved one summer during the war.

But I can learn to be okay with that. It does not mean my love is any less true than it used to be. The memories are not any less golden. It just means the future, which used to be as certain as the sun, is now as unclear as looking through the Winter blizzard. I am blind, and lost in the middle of a snowstorm. Just a beautiful little fool left in the cold.

You'll see me in hindsight

Tangled up with you all night

Burnin' it down

Someday, when you leave me

I bet these memories

Follow you around