Someday, I Hope Your Ghost Grows Tired of Me

Someday, I wonder if you will quietly fade away from my memory, not with the mercy of a door closing, not with the dignity of a burial, but slowly, obscurely, the way a face disappears from an old photograph when it has been left too long in the sun. I think of forgetting not as a kindness, but as a kind of final weather, a grey and patient rain that must fall for years before the earth stops remembering where the fire was. Perhaps one day your name will no longer move through me like a hand searching in the dark. Maybe it will become only a sound, distant and almost meaningless, something heard from another room in a house where I no longer live. I do not know whether that would save me or finish what you began.

There was a time when your absence arrived with the weight of a body. It sat beside me at tables. It slept in the hollow of the bed. It followed me from room to room like a starving animal, pressing its cold mouth to my palms, asking to be fed with every thought I had left. I had imagined grief as something grander, something with black veils and rain against windows, but it was smaller than that, and therefore more cruel. It was the untouched cup. The quiet hallway. The second plate that no longer had a reason to exist. It was the strange embarrassment of continuing to breathe in a world where something essential had been removed and everyone else seemed not to notice the missing piece.

You did not merely go. That would have been almost simple. People go; trains leave stations, birds abandon trees, ships become less than a line at the edge of the sea. But what happened here was not movement. It was subtraction. A hand reached into the center of my life and took away its hidden architecture, and afterward everything remained standing only because ruin sometimes has the manners to keep its shape. I moved through days that looked ordinary from the outside, but inside them I was a wreckage pretending to be a person, carrying my own broken beams, my own shattered glass, my own little weather of dust and collapse. No one saw how carefully I had to step over myself.

And still, some ruined part of me kept making room for you. That was the shame of it. Even after the lamps went out, even after silence grew its roots through the walls, even after the truth had settled like ash over every surface, something in me remained foolishly arranged around your possible return. It is terrible, the loyalty of the abandoned heart. It stands at the threshold long after the footsteps have vanished. It keeps the old hunger warm. It mistakes every sound for mercy. I wanted to tear that tenderness out of me with my own hands, to become clean of it, to be spared the humiliation of aching for the one who had already become elsewhere.

So perhaps forgetting is not peace. Perhaps it is only another kind of violence, slower and less honest. Maybe I must lose you twice, first to the world, and then to myself. First as presence, then as memory. First in the terrible brightness of your going, then in the dim, unceremonious fading of all that remains. I imagine this future with a grief I cannot explain. I long for it, and I fear it. I want the day to come when your shadow no longer lies across my thoughts, when I can pass through an hour without finding your outline hidden inside it; and yet there is something unbearable in knowing that even pain can grow tired, that even longing can become too exhausted to remember what it once guarded.

One day, I hope, the rooms will stop speaking your language. The walls will no longer hold the echo of what was said, or what was not said, which is sometimes the louder thing. The bed will become only a bed. The window will forget the nights I stood before it as though distance were something I could stare into submission. The places where I broke will become ordinary again, not healed, exactly, but stripped of witness. A chair will be moved. A drawer will be cleaned. Some small relic will be found and held for a moment without trembling, and that will be its own quiet devastation, to discover that the heart can touch the remains of its own ruin and feel only a tired, faded tenderness.

I hope, when it happens, I do not notice. I hope there is no grand revelation, no sudden freedom ringing through the body, no beautiful morning opening like forgiveness. I hope only that one day I reach the end of an evening and realize, with a kind of dull astonishment, that I have not carried you through it. Not your voice, not your hands, not the shape of the silence you left behind. I hope your memory thins until it can no longer cut me. I hope it becomes a thread worn so fine by years of handling that it breaks without sound. I hope I do not bend to pick it up.

But there is no triumph in that imagined day. There is only the last poverty of loss, that after all this suffering, after all the nights spent with my heart folded like a letter no one came back to read, the ending may be nothing more than absence forgetting absence. You will not return. I will not be restored. The wound will not become beautiful simply because it stops bleeding. It will only grow quiet, and in that quiet something of me will also be gone. Somewhere far inside, where I once kept the bright and terrible proof that I had loved you, there will be an empty room, and even the dust in it will have forgotten your name.