The thought comes unbidden, but what thought doesn’t? If I had left sooner, things would be different.

I was not thinking about her, nor anything else in that year in fact, and yet the thought came, and the hair on my nape still stands.

For years just a sharp-folded note and the memory of phone calls, an unspoken gape in my chest. I spent a decade dissecting events, half-forgotten sighs and the crackling of static, and somehow forgot that she’d asked me to come right away.

Was it honor, or compassion that made me stay? Not likely, given my history. More likely fear of not having the argument, fear of being thought a coward for leaving a terminal note. Elissa would have cried, would have raged, and in a month have moved on, and would hate me still. We never talk, but she does not hate me. How much is that worth?

“You could come now.”
“That’s true, I could. I could buy a bus ticket.”
“They’re cheap! and I could see you tomorrow.”
“But what… should I just leave a note?”
“She won’t care, Chris. You know she won’t.”

I stayed to have the argument. And then for five years after that.

We might have walked together to the grocery store that night.

Perhaps nothing would have changed, except to trade a last phone call for a hurried embrace and the ability to mourn her aloud.

I might have taken the bicycle. A sobering thought, that, though far less painful amortized over the next eternal leaden months, and there is this as well, beneath it all:
she was a better person than me.

She was a better person than me.

1. 
   Holly 2006 05 04 at 9:05:59 pm

   I read the J series, Chris.

   Wow.

2. 
   spyder 2006 05 06 at 4:22:42 pm

   Why does this remind me of Poe??  Substitute Lenore for???

   Once upon a midnight dreary,
   while I pondered,
   weak and weary,
   Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
   While I nodded,
   nearly napping,
   suddenly there came a tapping,
   As of some one gently rapping,
   rapping at my chamber door.
   “‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered,
   “tapping at my chamber door-
   Only this, and nothing more.”

   Ah, distinctly I remember
   it was in the bleak December,
   And each separate dying ember
   wrought its ghost upon the floor.
   Eagerly I wished the morrow;-
   vainly I had sought to borrow
   \From my books surcease of sorrow-
   sorrow for the lost Lenore-
   For the rare and radiant maiden
   whom the angels name Lenore-
   Nameless here for evermore.