Gone.

With your headlamp on your forehead, you smiled, that day, that summer.

"Maybe I'll get to go to Iceland this year. Or Prague, or Africa."

You smiled at the sky, and even then, months ago, you were already gone.

The Story

It was a one summer back that I dug my fingers into the thick blades of grass in your backyard, when that rabbit hopped by. The rabbit that I always told you wasn’t wild. His ears were too long, and his comfort around people was too strong for any sort of natural tendencies. You rolled on your back, adorned with your headlamp and raincoat for no reason and claimed that you were ready for jungle exploration. I looked at the grass and asked you why domestic rabbits weren’t enough, do you really have to go to a jungle, but you laughed instead of answering. A summer. It was a summer ago when I had no job, and you had too many, so that when I came to visit, I would spend hours out on your back lawn, reading books until I fell asleep on the warm concrete, or waiting around on your living room with the thick carpet in-between my toes.
Your house. We were in love, back then, in your house. I never told you, but in the beginning, your house scared the shit out of me. I watched it from the corner of my eye. Filled with family photographs and other normal things like sewing rooms and toys from when you were six. Boxes of car magazines and assurance that one day you would amount to something.

Sometime after we began snapping photographs on the boardwalk of southern New Jersey, I started to love your house. The way your mother’s rocking chair still swung minutes after she got up to cook dinner. The way the house’s floors muffled the sound of a hard walker’s feet. Your room was where I felt I fit into one of the only niches I could find in your life. In the room where the grey walls showed off photographs of bikers, trucks, trains speeding to this country or that. Boxes upon boxes piled up to the sides of your bed, filled with vintage tinker toys; that particular box of old keys you kept on your bedside dresser. Right over the drawer you used to keep our scrapbook, my letters, and my picture inside of. To the right of the corkboard you kept magazine cutouts and photographs of family and friends.I never made it to your cork board. Your clothes spewed forth from your closet that was never cleaned, and your bureau vomited t-shirts and dirty shorts from hiking trips. Bike chains and gear parts covered the floor, tripping me every time I walked in the room.

In that room, one night, you pulled out your box of keys and I asked you to tell me which one would be the key to your heart, if it existed. You pulled out the smallest, most ornate one. This one, you said. I put it on the chain around my neck. You liked the idea of keys and locks representing cold, hard feelings, and you had always wanted to close two locks around one another, to show the rest of the town we were in love, closed and set. We used padlocks, but combinations for its release were always there. “You attach it to the side of a bridge”, you would tell me, and then we’d be “just as romantic and hopeful as young couples are in Florence”, where that mass of locks, all huddled around and among one another, keep people holding hands forever.

It was ironic, I told you that summer, that we had both visited Florence, with different people, different years, before we knew each other. But I wanted a way to show off our feelings in a less iron way, in a more organic way. We both decided we should be vintage and carve our initials into tree trunks, but you wanted to on our college campus and I thought that juvenile. I wanted to carve hearts all over Keene Valley, but you feared for the opinion of others. Hikers crave unmarked trails, you would tell me, so in a huff I let it be. Now, our initials exist only on a bridge in Connecticut somewhere. It seemed as if we could only do things on the run. Even serious conversations were held on the sides of roads, our stomping grounds for things amiss. Blinking caution lights reflecting tearful conversations, and serious misunderstandings.

One especially hot day, that summer, we peeled our bodies from the dirty seats of your unwashed Jeep and sprawled across old towels on Wildwood’s beach. The boardwalk attracted few people that day and the water even fewer. The sun gently warmed my shoulders, made you wipe the sweat from your eyebrows and made the seaweed sweetly stink. The water was still that day: even the surfers noticed. I pushed my hands into the sand and inspected every grain that stuck under my fingernails. You played with a shell between your palms and without looking at me told me I was everything you wanted in a lady. I smiled, and pushed my hair aside. How so, I wondered. You just are, no reason really. I laughed and said I was glad he thought so. I will always remember how that made me feel: wanted. I was wanted by you, I was enough for you, and in turn, that was enough for me.

Phonecall?

I finally take the time out of my day to write to read, and what do I get? My phone vibrating with the words "DON'T ANSWER. NO REALLY." flashing up on the screen. I felt a rush of hot horror flash through my body starting somewhere in my skull and landing in my toes, taking all my strength with it into the bottoms of my shoes. I was convinced for a second I peed myself. Luckily, the phone just kept flashing until the call went to voicemail and no emergency bathroom breaks were needed. But hold on, let's be serious: the hell does he want? Really? Calling at two in the afternoon? What could possibly have happened at two in the afternoon that he would feel the need to call me? If it was at night that would be one thing. Then at least he could have been drunk and needed to tell me sorry he called, he can't remember why he called in the first place, and was I doing okay? At least then he would have had to call the following day and apologize for the annoyance. But unless he took up a hardcore drinking problem, it's still 2PM and it is still too early to get saucy off a single beer like he normally sips. Maybe someone kicked the bucket; did someone important die? I checked BBC, CNN and Google, but no one of any importance. Tom Waits and Mick Jagger are still alive and kicking. Did he forget a sweatshirt at my house? Did the new girl make him cry? Did I leave more CDs than I had thought in his truck's glovebox? I'm pretty sure I cleared them all out but there are still quite a few empty pockets in my CD case. Maybe he missed being able to tell me how work was or how his Dad never stopped bothering him about getting a real job and medical insurance. He left a voicemail; I had to go through 5 unchecked messages from my mother until I got to the one he left and: it was the sound of him hanging up.