Illustration by Eryn Lougheed
The summer before you left, I wrote a note on my phone at 6:03 am: At night, when English ceases to exist and is replaced instead with wordless intonations.
I was trying to explain the sounds we make to communicate when we are both somewhere behind our bodies.
In sleep we were always clearest to each other. Words got in the way.
With words we were both bristling on either side of the divide. When we argued over sugar measurements you thought I meant your parents had failed you. I thought you were denying that your upbringing was gendered. When we argued about music you thought I meant you were sexist. I thought I meant taste is subjective and I won’t subject myself to another band of white, pretentious men because they already dominate the industry and I just don’t care about your favourite band. In retrospect, maybe you were right—I did mean you were sexist.
I knew we were speaking different languages when we said I love you. I meant I saw the future in your face. When you said love it meant something else. When I told you not to promise forever, I meant I’ve danced this dance before. I felt you turning away long before you did, just like I knew you loved me before you believed in love. You promised anyway. I believed you the second time. I made that choice but you only chose me back for so many days. To me, love meant choosing to compromise. To you, it meant never needing to.
In the fall, before you left, I wrote: I was trying to understand the conversation we had where you so visibly sealed yourself inside and I cried all over the living room and wrote I love you on a note before falling asleep in your bed and when I woke up the note was gone.
The day after you left, I wrote: Maybe we will both just feel inadequate for each other until we don’t. It broke my heart to see how hard you were trying to feel nothing. You had that expression I have always interpreted as an apology. The one you give me when you can’t give me what I have no right to demand. You’re my best friend. The ache was so instant. You left and it appeared.
When you left the conversation you surrendered your part of the narrative. I interpreted your silences the best way I knew how because that’s the only option you left me with. The absence signifies.
That was before I realized it was only ever me, refracted. I produced the role and cast you in it, you didn’t exist until I created you.
How many times will I restart the process of self-translation? When I interpret the words I wrote at the time do I amend their meaning? When I remember a memory am I dismembering it, reassembling it with altered pieces? The moment the thought materializes I am no longer the same person. In a week none of this will hold true. The pieces evolve and I begin again.
I knew we were speaking different languages when we said I love you.
There was something about your absence or your presence that polarized my reactions.
The summer after you left, I said: I didn’t want to lose you to the freeze-frame I wanted you in motion, enduring.
Last month I said: I would have loved you in the freeze-frame.
The winter after you left, I said: life unpaused when I met you.
This winter I said: I liked that you held me still amongst all of my disparate selves, provided consistency to my fluctuations.
The truth shifts somewhere in between.
You waited on the landing outside my door for months, around every corner on my walk home. You never left. You were only ever leaving or already coming back.
The spring after you left, I said: It’s not enough that I’ll find someone else, I want to find you again I want to find me again I won’t ever find me again. You made me feel safe how will I ever feel safe without you?
The fall after you left, I said: It’s enough for me to know that some part of you is mine forever. You didn’t believe in love before you met me. I changed your mind in only 18 days.
Was it because I was relying too much on the narrative? Did I really think love could make us salvageable?
There was a safety in the heartbreak, it kept you with me. The winter after you left, I said: six hours into the future and I still love you. I said: how do I translate midnight into dawn over the Atlantic how do I translate me back to myself when I am still with you? I said: six hours into the future four months into the freeze-frame, jump-cut over the ocean.
I left traces of you in places you have never been by remembering you from the other side of an ocean. I didn’t want you on the trip with us but I still felt sick when I forgot your laugh in Ireland, in the winter. I felt sick when I remembered it again in the summer, back home.
In the fall, after you left, I said I knew you better than you knew yourself. In the winter you told me you had always been happy and the earthquake of the lie took my breath away. Did you mean you thought you were happy? Did you mean this is as good as it gets? I carried your weight around for years and I still don’t know what it was.
I started getting the plots mixed up. Were you leaving me or was I leaving you? What tense were we in? Who hid the access code to my future? Which one of us was waiting on the landing? I spent months seeking you further and further into abstraction but I still cried when I pictured your face.
That was over a year ago. For a long time when I wrote about myself I thought you saturated the process.
You told me an image in passing once—jam jar abandoned on the sidewalk. Shards of glass I never even saw. The image as I see it exists only in my mind, a fabricated memory. If I remove you from the story all that remains are shattered particles sticking to the night. But the picture is sharper than my own past: scintillating red glistens on the sidewalk, glittering pieces reflecting the street lights, strawberry jam gleaming ruby ash, scent still sweet. Your image, meanwhile, is blurred—faces don’t remain like poetic imagery, the symbolism of ruptured fragments. Were you ever even in the picture or was it only the scene from your perspective? You told me the story and I assumed your role, our eyes as one. I found myself in you. It took me months to reclaim your side of the bed from the ghost, lingering in your space. And this was supposed to be for me, devoid of you. Instead, I am the absent one and you saturate every sentence. I smeared you all over everything as soon as you left, every memory, even the ones that weren’t yours. I can’t unravel you from the foundations because I stitched you into every row, purposefully. Consciously. I revisited my memories in the context of your absence and now they are tainted. But I am not the shattered jam jar on the sidewalk. I am not the missing person in the bed. You left but I can come back. This time I will not leave me, too.
That was before I realized your ghost was just another part of me.
I thought it was you for so long. I didn’t know how to translate the image. I didn’t know how to hold my own pieces so I held yours instead. You left and I disappeared too. I lost myself to your void because I never had access to myself on my own. You gave me admission to the world, I engaged with life through you. I didn’t trust myself with happiness so I stored it with you, for safe-keeping. You filtered reality into a language I could understand. I couldn’t recognize my future anywhere outside of your reflection.
By now you have long been erased from the picture. Every time I revisited our memories they were less us and more me. I squinted more closely at the ghost on the landing and one day she was my mirror image. I was only ever finding pieces of myself scattered within you. You were a projection of my desires onto another body.
In certain moments I thought we recognized each other. But you were still a stranger. One I mistook for myself.
The closest I ever got to knowing you was without words. Sharing a bed was a conversation we both understood—half-asleep, the gaps between intention and interpretation were easily negotiated.
If we ever spoke the same language it was during the Boston evening we sat on a porch together silhouetted from the light spilling out through the windows at our backs. You told me a story—but not in words—in the silences between them, the shared space of the moment. I didn’t understand the scene you had painted but I knew that it was me on the porch with you. The significance translated.
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