Chapter 5: Remembering the little details.
1116 Words
Something shifted in my chest…
A drop, clean and fast.
"How long?"
"Eight weeks."
A beat.
"Maybe a little more."
I nodded slowly.
The hallway was narrow and quiet and the sounds of the family drifted from somewhere in the house like they were coming from another world entirely.
"That's a long time."
"It is," he said.
We looked at each other.
I could see it… what he was doing, what this was.
It was in the set of his jaw and the careful, measured distance he was keeping between us and the way he was holding himself with a deliberateness that wasn't natural to him.
He had thought about this….
Turned it over. Arrived at a decision.
He was going to London and he was going to let eight weeks and four thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean do what he couldn't make himself do standing in a hallway…close whatever this was before it became something neither of us could take back.
It was sensible. It was responsible. It was exactly the right thing.
I hated it with a completeness that surprised me.
"Safe travels," I said.
My voice was even. I was proud of it.
Something moved through his face.
"Take care of yourself, Hyacinth."
Not you too. Not I will.
Just….take care of yourself. Like he was leaving me with instructions. Like he was worried about what I'd do with the distance.
He left.
I heard the front door, then nothing.
I sat on the bench for another minute with my hands in my lap. Then I stood up, went out to my car, and drove home.
I sat in the parking lot of my building for ten minutes without getting out.
Not thinking, exactly. Just sitting with the engine off and the quiet and the particular feeling of having watched a door close that you hadn't realized you wanted open until it was already shut.
I went upstairs. Made tea I forgot to drink.
Sat on my couch with the mug going cold on the table and my phone face-up beside me and did not open the photo of the sky, and then opened the photo of the sky, and sat looking at it for longer than I meant to.
Eight weeks.
I ran the logic the way you do when you're trying to convince yourself of something sensible. Eight weeks was time.
Time was what this needed…distance and ordinary days and the slow, clarifying work of remembering what things actually were versus what they felt like in a dim hallway or on a porch at night.
I knew who he was. I knew who I was. I knew the shape of our family and what it held and what it couldn't. Eight weeks was a mercy. A reset. A gift I should have been relieved to receive.
I wasn't relieved.
I was sitting on my couch at four in the afternoon looking at a photo of a sky and feeling something I had run out of soft words for.
At eleven that night my phone lit up the dark room.
A photo. No text above it, nothing to prepare me.
Just an image that loaded slowly, dark resolving into detail…a city skyline seen through a floor-to-ceiling hotel window, vast and illuminated and alive with itself, all that compressed, anonymous life rendered into grids of light against a black sky.
Beautiful in that way that cities are only beautiful at night, when the scale of them becomes something close to humbling.
I sat up.
I knew it before I confirmed it.
Knew it the way you know a thing you've thought about in private..immediately, in the chest, before your mind has finished processing.
Edinburgh.
I had said it exactly once.
Fourteen months ago, at my grandmother's kitchen table, in the middle of a conversation about the holidays that I had mostly been half-listening to.
The family had been arguing about destinations…someone wanted the beach, someone wanted mountains, my grandfather wanted wherever had the best driving..and I had said, to no one in particular, not even expecting anyone to hear I've always wanted to see Edinburgh at night.
There's something about the way it looks… the lights against all that old stone. Like a city that knows it's been there a long time.
My aunt had said something about cold weather. Someone else had pivoted back to beaches. The moment had folded itself into the ongoing argument and disappeared and I had never mentioned it again.
He had routed through Edinburgh. Changed his itinerary, or chosen it specifically, or arranged whatever needed arranging… and from a hotel room with a floor-to-ceiling window and that view spread out below him, the first thing he had done was take a photograph and send it to me.
No words. No caption. Nothing that could be held up and examined.
Just…I remembered. I was here and I thought of you and I remembered.
My hands were not entirely steady when I screenshotted it.
I set my phone down on the nightstand. Lay back in the dark and looked at the ceiling and thought about a man who was trying very hard to do the right thing and who kept doing this instead ..kept sending photographs through the dark across distances, kept leaving these small, wordless proofs of attention that said everything he wasn't saying.
And I thought about myself… lying here saving them, collecting them, lying in the dark wanting more of them.
Eight weeks, I told myself.
My phone buzzed.
I picked it up.
One message. Five words, and I read them and my face went warm from the inside out.
Get some sleep, good girl.
I read it again. Then a third time. The words sat in the bright rectangle of my screen and my stomach did something slow and complicated that I was not ready to put a name to.
He had never …not once in all the years I had known him ..called me that. It wasn't a family word. It wasn't a casual word. It was a specific word, chosen, sent at eleven-something at night from a hotel room in Edinburgh to my dark bedroom, and it landed somewhere it had no business landing and took up residence there like it had always meant to.
I put the phone face-down on the nightstand.
Pressed both hands over my face.
Lay in the dark and listened to my own breathing and did not think about eight weeks, or London, or the careful distance he had kept in a hallway that morning, or the way he had said take care of yourself like he was worried I wouldn't.
I didn't sleep for a long time.
- Writer
