Illustration by Ishaan Barrett
I read a book when I was younger which had a ghost who was only allowed to retrace the exact steps he had taken in life. Even if I don’t believe in any semblance of ghosthood, sometimes I take the long way around, zig-zagging over the cobblestones just to give myself options after I’ve shuffled off the mortal coil. Once I’m done with this life, and (maybe) while I’m sitting in the empty movie theater or hotel lobby or whatever space it is between worlds, I’ll be allowed to go through a revolving door of all the things I want to remember from You.
I have all the chips and cracks in Your cheap folding table memorized. I remember warm evenings sitting at it while you cooked on a stove that was just slightly too small to fit both the pot of ravioli and the pan of perspiring butter and sunny-side up eggs. I taught you the word sunny-side up. You taped it to the cabinet over the stove so you would remember it. There used to be a box of microwave popcorn with the last sticky kernels fused into the bottom of the paper that took you at least three weeks to throw away. Even though I had enjoyed the popcorn while it was warm, somehow I enjoyed the last few kernels more. There was something about finding the final carcinogenic crumbs, unrecognizable as food, and sucking out the sweetness in the burnt sugar.
Sometimes I would mend your clothes too, reattaching buttons and patching worn parts. You dug through your closet and found even the most threadbare things for me to fix. I don’t think you would ever wear those old sweatshirts, but I felt a sense of permanence closing up the holes in the sleeves from cigarette ash, each stitch saying, I was here. I was here, and I loved you like this.
In a few weeks, your apartment will be empty, somebody else will have your table, and your bookshelf, and maybe all that there will be left will be Patafix pockmarks in the walls, unless you manage to patch them up too. The sunlight will hit the walls in the same faded way it always had, although the apple seedlings on your windowsill will be gone, and so will we.
And I have left my marks on another wall too, ones that probably cost You good money when you moved out. There might still be leftover duct tape from the messages I left on the inside of your window screen. I stuck up your posters and my drawings using the same dwindling roll. The satisfying rip of each strip, the raw residue it left, the stink of fresh adhesive. And now sometimes I can’t walk through a hardware store without feeling a dull resentment rattle through my chest. Your bed was narrow and hard, and I slept crammed between you and the cold glass of the window, feeling every gust of wind and every soothing spring thaw. I fit myself into an uncomfortable space because you were my comfort, but there were only so many knocking elbows and knees each of us could take. Sometimes I look up and I get the sense that I am who I was back then on your windowsill, dangling my head out as far as it will go into the chill night air, pretending not to feel as hopelessly lost as I did.
All relationships leave detritus, some to be preserved in boxes with letters and dried flowers, others to be unceremoniously dumped, the flotsam and jetsam of lessons learned. I took the initiative myself to throw out the last birthday card I gave you, stormed out of your room one day with it crumpled in my hand, as if I could take back each stroke of the pen telling you": I was here. I was here, and I loved you like this.
And then I laid next to You, pretending not to hear the clock tick away the weeks, days, minutes, seconds we had left, the both of us caught between the pages of the calendar and the sheets on your bed. I was almost always a little colder than I admitted that I was. Sitting face to face in the blue hour of night in the porcelain embrace of the bathtub, words escaped me, slipping through my searching thoughts and pooling down the drain. All I could do was breathe in tandem with you, wishing each shivering inhale-exhale carried in condensed form the things I wanted to say. In the dark, I held on to you as if I could absorb into my skin the feeling of you smiling against my cheek, your fingers sketching out my features as if you could memorize me better by touch. We both have “Sea of Love” on our playlists. Cat Powers’ voice is fragile, ethereal. The song is much too short.
A certain slant of light, spring mornings, you look like the sun made incarnate and I wondered what I will leave in your life, what ephemera you will hold on to, what marks I could etch in your space to tell the world: I was here. I was here and I loved you like this.
The mistake I made in this fantasy is that I am a ghost. That there is nobody that could come through that revolving door, that hotel lobby, that movie theater, to see me wallowing in nostalgia. Real life is not so neat.
Sitting on the meridian outside the 2nd Avenue subway watching the flow of cars and their red tail lights part around us like the river around a rock, I hold on to pieces of the past and let myself cry. We both look different. Unmoored from each other, we have found new currents in life. But now we are here, together. The bench we sit on borders a scruff of grass that hides broken bottles and old piss.
It’s hard to hold onto old memories when they are right in front of me, and I’m petrified of strangling the new ones. It’s even harder to unspool myself from the past, from tidy conclusions and “The Ends” to the uncharted territory of new books entirely. I can’t even explain how terrifying it is to live in a moment that feels so fragile, feeling like I am on the cusp of ruining it all. But slowly, surely, the traffic, the cold, your presence, smooth over the jagged edges. I can’t say it in the moment, not aloud, but you catch it in my eyes and I catch it in yours.
I am here. I am here, and I love you like this.
T. Chang (she/her), is a junior in the School of General Studies, majoring in Human Rights.