Almost a year now, exactly a year next Tuesday. It’s still so hard to believe. We were supposed to get old, together though on separate tracks, like two trains running parallel. I actually thought this though of course we were no longer a ‘we’ but a they, which is a we that once was. I thought a lifetime of things would happen to each of us and then, very old, we’d maybe get together again. For what, I have no idea - I never thought further ahead than that. Still it wasn’t impossible to think so, was it? It’s not that I hoped for or expected such a thing, it was enough to know it was possible. But now I wonder - what in the world was I thinking, that the hard things would ever not have to be said? That we would go the rest of our lives not talking about the elephant that stood silently between us? That there could be any kind of coming together without the mortar of discussion, words poured from a bag like tiny stones, mixed together with sweat and tears of effort til it formed a paste that would glue together the bricks of meaning.
You went on without me, though only, it is true, after I shut the door. Now I’m left with this huge bag of words, having to make sense of it all by myself, trying to understand what I wanted to say to you but didn’t. What did you think about as you neared the end? I do not hope you thought about me; I did not want to be a source of pain at the end, after you’d rebuilt after the devastation of the other mortar, the one I used to launch the shell that exploded our lives.
In all the time we were together, I never really knew what you were thinking, what you might say next. Your intelligence went in a different direction than mine, not to mention higher and deeper and wider than mine could ever go. People who know me think I am being self-deprecating when I say that; I am not. Your brilliance was often underestimated, not that you minded - brilliance doesn’t need to be reflected to know what it is.
It’s not that I couldn’t understand you, or didn’t, but that I was content to let you be, to accept your love without examining the source of it too closely. I was happy to leave you with the run of your thoughts, like a river flowing quietly through the house, the comfort of its music always there. Now the river is gone, dried up, flowed into crevasses where I have no access and I am here in the empty riverbed, gathering stones for mortar, for whatever meaning I can build.