Remembrance

Every day she writes him a letter.

The sad, heavy truth of this never fails to steal a breath from her
throat, but she still curls her paling fingers around the pen. In
truth, the whorls of her fingertips are stained with the guilt of every
letter she's ever written, and she thinks that perhaps obsession never
leaves.

She's always been fiercely, hopelessly critical, but despite that she
forgives him in every scrawled line, with every stunted
paragraph.

'I see your reflection in the mirror, love. You stand at my shoulder,
and I don't remember which side the angel sits at and which the devil
takes. Perhaps I don't want to remember.

I can no longer feel the honey of your lips on mine, I can't see the
furl in your forehead when you concentrate, or the smile you whisk away
before it has a chance to blossom. I can't because I shouldn't, but
sometimes my memory is blurred, and these thoughts rise unbidden before
I call them forth.'

She always folds the page in the same way, precise even after
everything, and the top corner locks into place with a snap that sounds
oddly like a breaking heart.

Every day she writes him a letter.

Outside, the sky is darkened with night, and the last spiteful snow of
a fading winter falls. For a bare moment she frowns, and her words
crumple in a folded fist as she forgets. Surprising how, after so long,
forgetting seems harder than remembering.

'A whisper is easier to write than a scream (is it because you only
ever wanted to hear the whispers?) and somehow nothing is the hardest
of all.

I never said I loved you, did I?'

She keeps the box in the attic so that it can be nearer to the stars.
Someday, she knows she'll open it, and all the unloved promises she
couldn't keep will fly to settle in the inky blackness, and flame like
ice or stars themselves.

She sometimes wants him back to share the rhythm of her heart, to kiss
the ink from her fingers. She wonders if the mounting promise of
despair she keeps here will end something, but somehow it doesn't seem
believable; if anything, each letter is another beginning, the
awakening and death of another memory. She can't count how many
thoughts there are left to atone for.

'I dreamed I hated you, but all you did was whisper that hate would be
my undoing, as if I didn't know, my love, that you creep into every
picture, every spare feeling. I see that my punishment is still to not
forget.'

The wood of the box is always warm under her fingers, as though he had
held it next to his heart. She drops the letter in amid the tattered
thoughts of every yesterday she's suffered, and tries not to
breathe.

As she walks back through the dust of years, she feels the weight of
remembering. She is the only one left to do it, and she only needs a
box of letters she'll never send to anchor her to the world. Her
anchorage is this: every day she writes him a letter, and carefully
folds it into a paper bird, wings spread as though if it wasn't
weighted by the past, it might fly.