I look at your face, so pale, so peaceful, and still feel the old, familiar feeling, and mistrust it even as I feel it. I wonder how it can be that I still feel this closeness. Even now …
I will never be able to explain this feeling to anyone. I am not supposed to feel it, given what happened. But this is how it is, and I am slowly accepting it, this emotion that seems to outlast everything else.
For the first time I stand alone, in every way: mentally, physically, emotionally. But even now it seems that my feeling, your feeling, what I am feeling here, now, looking at your face — it overcomes all fear, blocks it out. All that remains is this tremendous closeness, this gentleness.
I don’t know how it can be that you were able to give me this gentle closeness, because no feeling can be gentle, because it is in the very nature of gentleness that it doesn’t last — it is a phenomenon that appears like a pinprick and vanishes into nothingness. Yet my gentleness endures. It is of a different order; it is more enduring than anything else in my life. And I have long since ceased to question it.
So here I sit, a few days before my departure, on the beach, our beach, from which we would always swim out into the cold water; on the sand, which is cool and damp, because it’s been raining for two days. In a moment I will cut off my hair and meet the new thoughts and the cool wind with a shorn head. Strand for strand, I will grow lighter, more weightless, perhaps freer, too. I’m sitting in our bay, where no one but us ever came, because this place seems so cold and bleak; here, where I first tried to offer you my love and you could not yet accept it, where we spent so many mornings and evenings after you learned to speak again, where so often we whispered our secrets, promises, desires, and plans to the sea.
I sit here. I look at you, and I feel the exhilaration of closeness: I dance this exhilaration on the grave of loneliness, because for me it is a denial of loneliness, a victory of elemental, Dionysian greed.
I am gentle; I am soft as wool, and my inside is silky smooth, as if I were a baby, a foetus, secure, wanted, untouched by the world.
You told me so often that I had forgotten who I was, and perhaps it is actually true. And perhaps, with you, I never knew it. Perhaps I only realised it when I stopped fighting this gentleness in me. But I know that I am not you, not anymore.
And just as I am not afraid of the solitude, the silence, the questions that will come after all of this, that perhaps are encapsulated in the word future, I am not afraid of this realisation. I will have to weep. All that I cannot process I must push out of me, and there will be no one to hold my brow — I am aware of that as well. But what does it matter?
I look at your face. You are beautiful. You are as beautiful as ever, and I find myself smiling. I look at your face and think that I am grateful to you, for this gentle closeness and this terrible alienation.
That even though this closeness is a feeling I can never share with anyone again — I let it go.
I look at you…
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